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STUDIES
IN THE
Evolutionary Psychology of Feeling

STUDIES IN THE

Evolutionary Psychology

of Feeling

BY

HIRAM M. STANLEY

Member of the American Psychological Association

London

SWAN SONNENSCHEIN & CO

NEW YORK: MACMILLAN & CO

1895

Butler & Tanner,

The Selwood Printing Works,

Frome, and London.

PREFACE

This work does not profess to be a treatise on the subject of feeling, but merely a series of studies, and rather tentative ones at that. I have attempted to deduce from the standpoint of biologic evolution the origin and development of feeling, and then to consider how far introspection confirms these results. I am well aware that I traverse moot points—what points in psychology are not moot?—and I trust that the position taken will receive thorough criticism. I should be very glad to have new facts adduced, whatever way they may bear. I have no theory to defend, but the results offered are simply the best interpretation I have as yet been able to attain.

Some of the material of this book has appeared during the last ten years in the pages of Mind, Monist, Science, Philosophical Review and Psychological Review, but my contributions to these periodicals have in many cases been largely re-written.

Hiram M. Stanley.

Lake Forest, Illinois, U S.A.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY

CHAPTER I
ON THE INTROSPECTIVE STUDY OF FEELING

Of all the sciences psychology is, perhaps, the most imperfect. If a science is a body of knowledge obtained by special research and accepted by the general consensus of specialists, then psychology is so defective as to scarcely merit the name of science. This want of consensus is everywhere apparent, and must especially impress any one who compares the lack of harmony in manuals of psychology with the practical unanimity in manuals of botany, geology, physics, and other sciences. Even in the most fundamental points there is no agreement, as will be evident in a most summary statement.

It is now something more than a century since the general division of psychic phenomena into intellect, feeling and will, first came into repute, but still some psychologists of note do not agree to this fundamental classification, but would unite feeling and will in a single order. As to the subdivisions of feeling and will we are confessedly wholly at sea. In intellect it is only on the lower side, sensation and perception, that anything of great scientific value has been accomplished; and even now it cannot be said that the classes of sensation have been marked off with perfect certainty. In the higher range of intellect psychology can do scarcely more than accept some ready-made divisions from common observation and logic. And if so little has been settled in the comparatively simple work of a descriptive classification of the facts of mind, we may be assured that still less has been accomplished toward a scientific consensus for the laws of mind. Weber’s law alone seems to stand on any secure basis of experiment, but its range and meaning are still far from being determined. Even the laws of the association of ideas are still the subjects of endless controversy. Also in method there is manifestly the greatest disagreement. The physiological and introspective schools each magnify their own methods, sometimes so far as to discredit all others. Physiological method has won for itself a certain standing, indeed, but just what are its limitations is still far from being settled.

But the grievous lack of generally accepted results is most apparent in the domain of feeling. The discussion of feeling in most manuals is very meagre and unsatisfactory. Professor James’s recent treatise, for instance, gives some 900 pages to the Intellect, and about 100 pages each to Feeling and Will. There is little thorough analysis and no perfected inductive classification. We often, indeed, find essays of literary value which appeal to the authority of literature. But to refer to Shakspeare or Goethe as psychological authorities, or in illustration or proof of psychological laws, is generally a doubtful procedure. The literary and artistic treatment of human nature is quite distinct from the scientific, and literature and art cannot be said to be of much more value for psychology than for physics, chemistry, or biology. To appeal to the Bible or Shakspeare in matters psychological, is usually as misleading as to consult them for light on geology or botany. Even the fuller treatises on the subject of feeling rarely reach beyond literary method and common observation, being for the most part a collection and arrangement of the results of common sense, accepting common definitions, terms, and classifications. Now, science is always more than common sense and common perception, it is uncommon sense; it is an insight and a prolonged special investigation which penetrates beneath the surface of things and shows them in those inner and deeper relations which are entirely hid from general observation. Common views in psychology are likely to be as untrustworthy as in physics or astronomy, or any other department. Science must, indeed, start with common sense, but it does not deserve the name of science till it gets beyond it.

Again, the subject of pleasure, pain, and emotion, is usually discussed with considerable ethical or philosophical bias. The whole subject of feeling has been so naturally associated with ethics and philosophy from the earliest period of Greek thought that a purely colourless scientific treatment is quite difficult. Furthermore, feeling has been too often discussed from an a priori point of view, as in the rigid following out of the Herbartian theory of feeling as connected with hindrance or furtherance of representation. Still further, the physical side of emotion has been so emphasized by the physiological school as to distract attention from purely psychological investigation.

It is obvious, then, on the most cursory review, that very little has been accomplished in the pure psychology of feeling. Here is a region almost unexplored, and which, by reason of the elusiveness and obscurity of the phenomena, has seemed to some quite unexplorable. Dr. Nahlowsky truly remarks, that feeling is a “strange[“strange] mysterious world, and the entrance to it is dark as to Hades of old.” Is there any way out of this darkness and confusion? If the study of feeling is to become scientific, we must, I think, assume that all feeling is a biological function governed by the general laws of life and subject in origin and development to the law of struggle for existence. Assuming this strictly scientific point of view, we have to point out some difficulties in the way of the introspective psychology of feeling as compared with other departments of biological science.

We trace directly and with comparative ease any physiological organ and function from its simplest to its most complex form; for example, in the circulation of the blood there is clearly observable a connected series from the most elementary to the most specialized heart as developed through the principle of serviceability. In some cases, as in the orohippus, a form in the evolution of the horse, we are able to predict an intermediate organism. Psychology is still far from this deductive stage; we have no analogous series of psychic forms, much less are able to supply, a priori, the gaps in a series. The reason for this is mainly the inevitable automorphism of psychological method. In biology we are not driven to understand life solely through analogy with our own life, but in psychology mind in general must be interpreted through the self-observation[self-observation] of the human mind. In biology we see without effort facts and forms of life most diverse from our own; the most strange and primitive types are as readily discernible as the most familiar and advanced, the most simple as the most complex. We study a fish just as readily as a human body, but the fish’s mind—if it has any—seems beyond our ken, at least is not susceptible of direct study, but a matter for doubtful inference and speculation. Whether a given action does or does not indicate consciousness, and what kind of consciousness, this is most difficult to determine. Thus we have the most various interpretations, some, as Clifford, even going so far as to make psychic phenomena universal in matter, others, on the other hand, as Descartes, limiting them to man alone.

The difficulty of this subjective method, this reflex investigation, is almost insurmountable. Consciousness must act as both revealer and revealed, must be a light which enlightens itself. A fact of consciousness to be known must not simply exist like a physical fact or object, as a piece of stone, but it must be such that the observing consciousness realizes or re-enacts it. To know the fact we must have the fact, we must be what we know. Mind is pure activity; we do not see an organ and ask what it is for, what does it do; but we are immediately conscious of consciousness as activity, and not as an objective organ. We must here, then, reverse the general order and know the activity before we can identify the organ as a physical basis.

By the purely objective vision of the lower sciences we can easily determine a genetic series of forms most remote from our own life, but in psychology, mind can be for us only what mind is in us. The primitive types of psychosis are, no doubt, as remote and foreign from our own as is the primitive type of heart or nervous system from that of man’s. In the case of heart and nerve we can objectively trace with certainty the successive steps, but in endeavouring to realize by subjective method the evolution of mind we are involved in great doubt and perplexity. How can we understand an insect’s feelings? How can we appreciate minds which are without apprehension of object, though there is reason to believe such minds exist? Only to a very limited extent can a trained and sympathetic mind project itself back into some of its immediately antecedent stages. Consciousness, because of its self-directive and self-reflective power, is the most elastic of functions, yet it can never attain the power of realizing all its previous stages. Sometimes, however, the mind in perfect quiescence tends to relapse into primitive modes, which may afterward be noted by reflection, but such occasions are comparatively rare. The subjective method means a commonalty of experience which is often impossible to attain. Thus a man may believe there are feelings of maternity; he has observed the expression of nursing mothers, and knows in a general way that here is a peculiar psychosis into which he can never enter, and which is, therefore, beyond his scientific analysis. The psychic life of the child is more akin to his than that of the mother; yet it is only by an incessant cultivation of receptivity and repression of adult propensities that one can ever attain any true inkling of infant experience. There is then, I think, a vast range of psychic life which must for ever lie wholly hidden from us, either as infinitely below or infinitely above us; there is also an immense realm where we can only doubtfully infer the presence of some form of consciousness without being able to discriminate its quality, or in exceptional cases to know it very partially; and there is but a relatively small sphere where scientific results of any large value may be expected. By reason of its objective method the realm of physical science is practically illimitable, but psychic science is, by reason of its subjective method, kept for ever within narrow boundaries.

We must then take into account the inherent difficulties of the subjective method as applied to the study of feeling and mind in general, and yet we must recognise its necessity. No amount of objective physiological research can tell us anything about the real nature of a feeling, or can discover new feelings. Granting that neural processes are at the basis of all feelings as of all mental activities, we can infer nothing from the physiological activity as to the nature of the psychic process. It is only such feelings and elements as we have already discovered and analyzed by introspection that can be correlated with a physical process. Nor can we gain much light even if we suppose—which is granting a good deal in our present state of knowledge—that there exists a general analogy between nerve growth and activity, and mental operations. If relating, i.e., cognition, is established on basis of inter-relation in brain tissue, if every mental connecting means a connecting of brain fibres, we might, indeed, determine the number of thoughts, but we could not tell what the thoughts were. So if mental disturbance always means bodily disturbance, we can still tell nothing more about the nature of each emotion than we knew before. We must first know fear, anger, etc., as experiences in consciousness before we can correlate them with corporeal acts.

Is now this necessarily subjective method peculiarly limited as to feeling? Can we know feeling directly as psychic act or only indirectly through accompaniments? Mr. James Ward (vide article on Psychology in the Encyclopædia Britannica, p. 49, cf. p. 71) remarks that feelings cannot be known as objects of direct reflection, we can only know of them by their effects on the chain of presentation. The reason for this is, that feeling is not presentation, and “what is not presented cannot be re-presented.” “How can that which was not originally a cognition become such by being reproduced?”

It cannot. But do we need to identify the known with knowing, in order that it may be known? Must feeling be made into a cognition to be cognized? It is obvious enough that no feeling can be revived into a representation of itself, but no more can any cognition or any mental activity. Revival or recurrence of consciousness can never constitute consciousness of consciousness which is an order apart. If cognition is only presentation and re-presentation of objects, we can never attain any apprehension of consciousness, any cognition of a cognition or of a feeling or of a volition, for they are all equally in this sense subjective acts. Re-presentation at any degree is never by itself sense of re-presentation or knowledge of the presentation.

Of course, the doctrine of relativity applies to introspection as to all cognition, and subject qua subject is as unknowable as object qua object. We do not know feeling in itself, nor anything else in itself, the subjective like the objective ding an sich is beyond our ken. Yet kinds of consciousness are as directly apprehended and discriminated as kinds of things, but the knowing is, as such, distinct from the known even when knowing is known. Here the act knowing is not the act known and is different in value. The object known is not, at least from the purely psychological point of view, ever to be confounded with the knowing, to be incorporated into cognition by virtue of being cognized. Feeling, then, seems to be as directly known by introspection and reflection as any other process. It is not a hypothetical cause brought in by the intellect to explain certain mental phenomena, but it is as distinctly and directly apprehended as cognition or volition.

The distinction between having a feeling and knowing a feeling is a very real one, though common phraseology confuses them. We say of a brave man, he never knew fear; by which we mean he never feared, never experienced fear, and not that he was ignorant of fear. Again, in like manner, we say sometimes of a very healthy person, he never knew what pain was, meaning he never felt pain. These expressions convey a truth in that they emphasize that necessity of experience in the exercise of the subjective method upon which we have already commented, but still they obscure a distinction which must be apparent to scientific analysis. We cannot know feeling except through realization, yet the knowing is not the realization. Being aware of the pain and the feeling pain are distinct acts of consciousness. All feeling, pain and pleasure, is direct consciousness, but knowledge of it is reflex, is consciousness of consciousness. The cognition of the pain as an object, a fact of consciousness, is surely a distinct act from the pain in consciousness, from the fact itself. The pain disturbance is one thing and the introspective act by which it is cognized quite another.

These two acts are not always associated, though they are commonly regarded as inseparable. It is a common postulate that if you have a pain you will know it, or notice it. If we feel pained, we always know it. This seemingly true statement comes of a confounding of terms. If I have a pain, I must, indeed, be aware of it, know it, in the sense that it must be[must be] in consciousness; but this makes, aware of pain, and knowing pain, such very general phrases as to equal experience of pain or having pain. But there is no knowledge in pain itself, nor pain in the knowing act per se. The knowing the pain must be different from the pain itself, and is not always a necessary sequent. We may experience pain without cognizing it as such. When drowsy in bed I may feel pain of my foot being “asleep,” but not know it as a mental fact. We may believe, indeed, that pain often rises and subsides in consciousness without our being cognizant of it, but, of course, in the nature of the case there is no direct proof, for proof implies cognizance of fact. Pain as mental fact, an object for consciousness, not an experience in consciousness, is what is properly meant by knowing pain. Consciousness-of-pain as knowledge of it is not always involved by pain-in-consciousness as experience of it. Consciousness of pain by its double meaning as cognizance of pain and experience of pain leads easily to obscurity of thought upon this subject. But experience does not, if we may trust the general law of evolution from simple to complex, at the first contain consciousness of experience. This latter element is but gradually built up into experience, though in the end they are so permanently united in developed ego life that it is difficult to perceive their distinctness and independence. That pain and pleasure are cognized as facts of consciousness seems to us clear, but this does not deny that for us, at least, they may be cognizable only in fusion with other elements, as with sensation or volition. But whether known only with other elements or not, pleasure-pain is equally known only by direct introspection. I know directly and immediately pain and pleasure when I experience them, though they always occur bound up with some sensation. It may be that I never experience mere pain but some kind of pain, as a pricking pain, burning pain, etc., and that I always recall pain by its sensation tone, that I cannot isolate it by any act of attention. (E. B. Titchener, Philosophical Review, vol. iii., p. 431.) However I know that I have pain as well as I know that I have a pricking or burning sensation. “Did you feel the prick?” “Yes.” “Was it painful or pleasurable?” “Pleasurable”; such a common colloquy implies as direct consciousness of the pleasure-pain as of the sensation. That I can at once discriminate a sensation as either pleasurable or painful certainly shows a direct awareness of pleasure-pain.

If pure pleasure-pain is primitive consciousness (see chap. ii.), it must be most rare phenomenon in such an advanced consciousness as that of the human adult: and it is not surprising that one should search for it in vain. But in any case it could not yield to attention. Attention as cognition views its object in relation, in a milieu; it can reproduce only by fastening upon something to reproduce by, but pure pleasure-pain has nothing connected with it. Again, attention as volition cannot reproduce mere pleasure-pain which is not volitional in its origin and growth like sensing, perceiving, or ideating. We merely “suffer” pain. Both pleasure and pain in themselves are purely passive; willing cannot directly affect them, and they are not, like cognitions, modes of volition, or effortful activities. For man to have a primitive consciousness by exercise of will would be quite as difficult as to turn himself into a protozoön.

Further, would not attention as introspective alertness to discover such a fact of consciousness as pure pleasure-pain denote that consciousness is thereby raised far above the level at which such a phenomenon can occur? In general also constant introspective attention tends to defeat itself. A continual intentness and watching for a given psychic phenomenon is a state which, the more intense and persistent it is, tends to bar out the particular state watched for, and, indeed, all other states than itself. If attention as act engrosses, it defeats itself.

If, however, undifferentiated pleasure-pain should at any time occur in human consciousness, might we become immediately and spontaneously aware of it? By its very nature it may escape conscious attentive investigation, but may there not be a direct and simple awareness or apperception of it? We might suppose that one man tells another, “I was very sick, and in state of coma I had pain, merely pain, not any kind of pain or pain anywhere, but just pain, that was all the consciousness I had.” Such an expression is intelligible, and may be a fact. However, it is in the phenomena of lapse and rise of consciousness that we see evidences that undifferentiated feeling probably occurs, and that sometimes in high psychisms. In the following chapter we discuss then this point as a matter of judgment of tendencies, rather than on basis of direct evidence of introspection, though this is not barred out.

CHAPTER II
ON PRIMITIVE CONSCIOUSNESS

Science views the world as an assemblage of objects having mutual relations. In this cosmos of interacting elements certain objects become endowed with mental powers by which they accomplish self-conservation. Just what these objects are and how they attain mental quality is beyond our direct investigation. However, assuming consciousness as a purely biological function, as a mode for securing favourable reactions, we can discuss the probable course of its evolution under the law of self-conservation. Mind, like all other vital function, must originate in some very simple and elementary form as demanded at some critical moment for the preservation of the organism. It is tolerably obvious that this could not be any objective consciousness, any cognitive act, like pure sensation, for this has no immediate value for life. It was not as awareness of object or in any discriminating activity that mind originated, for mere apprehension would not serve the being more than the property of reflection the mirror. The demand of the organism is for that which will accomplish immediate movement to the place of safety. The stone pressed upon by a heavy weight does not react at once to secure itself, but is crushed out of its identity; but the organism reacts at once through pain. It is certainly more consonant with the general law of evolution that mind start thus in pure subjective act rather than in mere objective acts, like bits of presentation or a manifold of sense. We shall now endeavour to elucidate this conception of pure pain as primitive mind, first from the general point of view of the law of self-conservation, and secondly from particular inductive considerations.

It is very difficult to conceive what this bare undifferentiated pain as original conscious act was, it being so foreign to our own mental acts. Our psychoses have a certain connection one with the other, and a connection which is cognized as such, so that the whole of mental life is pervaded by an ego-sense. But primitive consciousness must have been by intermittent and isolated flashes. The primitive pain, moreover, was not a pain in any particular kind, but wholly undifferentiated or bare pain. There was no sense of the painful, but only pure pain. Nor was there any consciousness of the pain, any knowledge or apperception of it. The pain stands alone and entirely by itself, and constituting by itself a genus.

Now to assert that this general pain exists, is not, of course, realism. The pain is a particular act, though it is wholly without particular quality. It is not a pain as one of a kind distinct from other kinds, but it is comparable to a formless, unorganized mass of protoplasm which has in it potency of future development. Pain may exist as such, but not a consciousness or a feeling. It is meaningless to say that the first psychosis may have been a consciousness in general form which was neither a feeling, a will, or a cognition, but the undifferentiated basis of these, nor can a feeling per se exist. The expressions, painful consciousness, and painful feeling are deceptive; there is no consciousness which pains, but consciousness is the pain, and the feeling is not pleasurable or painful, but is the pleasure or pain. “Feeling,” as I have said (Mind, vol. xiii., p. 244), “has no independent being apart from the attributes which in common usage are attached to it, nor is there any general act of consciousness with which these properties are to be connected.”

Further, the law of conservation requires us to associate with this primitive act of blind, formless pain the will act of struggle and effort which is as simple and undifferentiated as the feeling. And these two we must mark as the original elements of all mental life. Strenuousness through and by pain is primal and is simplest force which can conduce to self-preservation. It is thus that active beings with a value in and for themselves are constituted. The earliest conscious response to outward things is purely central and has no cognitive value. The first consciousness was a flash of pain, of small intensity, yet sufficient to awaken struggle and preserve life.

Pleasure, then, we have excluded from playing any rôle in absolutely primitive consciousness. Pleasure and pain could not both be primitive functions, and of the two pain is fundamental in that the earliest function of consciousness must be purely monitory. Pain alone fulfils primitive demands, and secures struggle which ends in the abatement of pain through change of environment or otherwise. Pain lessens, but pleasure does not come, but unconsciousness instead, for no continuous organic psychic life is yet evolved. As long as pain continues there is effort and self-conserving action; when pain ceases, consciousness ceases, because the need for it is gone. Each fit of pain subsides into unconsciousness as struggle succeeds, and there is no room for even the pleasure of relief, which, indeed, must be accounted a tolerably late feeling. As far as the lowest organisms have a conscious life it is a pain life, but they have a Nirvana in a real unconsciousness. The evolution of pleasure must be accounted a distinct problem.

The law of evolution is, that origin of function and all progressive modification arise at critical stages. Thus it is in painful circumstances that the origin of mind is to be traced, and the important steps in its development have been achieved in severest struggle and acutest pain at critical periods. Pleasure is not then the original stimulant of will, but is a secondary form. Pleasure has an obvious utility which is far from the absolutely primitive. The pleasure-mode early enters, however, to sharpen by contrast the pain-mode, and it is only by their interaction that any high grade of psychic life could be built up. The development of pleasure cannot be from pain, but as a polar opposite to it. We cannot bring the development of mind into a perfectly continuous evolution from a single germ, as is the case in biological evolution. In a sense we may say that pleasure and pain are complementary, like positive and negative electricity, but the comparison cannot be pressed. We cannot, indeed, carry it so far as to believe either absolutely essential to the other. We mention, then, the evolution of pleasure as a problem which is yet to be dealt with in full. However, that it is not original element in mind is easily seen from this. As we ascend the grades of psychic life the pleasure-pain gamut lengthens, and as we descend, it shortens, with pleasure always as the intermediate factor. Thus, if we can represent it by a line,

any single element which can affect psychic life, as temperature, moves through a highest pain intensity, an intermediate region, then to pain again as effects in a range from a very high temperature to very low, or vice versâ. Now, this gamut in a human being, from the intensest agony from heat to the greatest suffering from cold, consists of very many notes, but the step to unconsciousness is always at one end of the scale. In lower psychic life it shortens, but always at the intermediate points where pain merges into pleasure and pleasure into pain, and thus in the lowest form the original element of consciousness as feeling is seen when only the two extremes remain, namely, primitive consciousness as pain reaction. As the step from feeling—consciousness to unconsciousness is through a pain, this certainly points to pain as the original feeling, and the first element of consciousness. We must suppose then that the first organism which attained consciousness felt pain, that if this came from temperature, for example, that intense heat and intense cold would both produce a pain one and the same in nature, bare pain, not sensation of heat or cold. And this pain-consciousness response came at first only at the application of these critical temperatures, all other degrees not bringing any response. If consciousness like other functions originated as an infinitesimal germ at some crisis in life, it must have been with pain. The pleasure function, unlike the pain, does not originate in life and death crises.

That pleasure is secondary is also suggested by this, that pleasure is mainly connected with such late formations as the special senses, whereas pain is prominent with earlier functions. Thus we have pleasures of taste, but visceral pleasure is scarcely noticeable, though visceral pain, as colic, may be very acute. Wild animals, which feed often under fear of interruption or in extreme hunger, bolt their food without tasting, and so miss taste pleasure, and this seems to be the type of primitive feeding.

The origin of pleasure is then, I think, to be traced as an intermediary feeling between pain as produced by excess, and pain from lack as differentiated form. Pain as original and undifferentiated is the same whether resulting from excess or lack, but it is only after it has differentiated so far as to be in two modes that pleasure can enter as a mediate form of feeling and become a directing force to advantageous action. The primitive pleasure-pain gamut was this:

A general survey from the point of view of self-conservation leads us then to regard the original psychic state as a pain-effort form. There is first a purely undifferentiated sense of pain and closely consequent a purely undifferentiated nisus. There is neither sense of objectivity in general, nor in any special mode, nor is there feeling of pleasure. And the study of what seem to be the earliest forms of mental life in the child and in the lower animals points toward this conclusion. Preyer, in his studies on the mind of the child, expresses his conviction that the feelings “are the first of all psychical events to appear with definiteness,” and that at first in no manifold forms. He adds, “The first period of human life belongs to the least agreeable, inasmuch as not only the number of enjoyments is small, but the capacity for enjoyment is small likewise, and the unpleasant feelings predominate until sleep interrupts them” (Mind of the Child, Part I., New York, 1888, p. 143, cf. p. 185). Since in the embryology of the mind as in that of the body the individual repeats in condensed manner the evolution of life, we judge that these observations point toward the genesis of consciousness in a single feeling state, pure undifferentiated pain. The earliest consciousness we can discover seems to approach this type. The close observer of very young infants must feel that the meagre psychic life they may have consists mainly of intermittent pains interrupted by comparatively long periods of unconsciousness in sleep. Of course, the earliest psychic life of the infant is not absolutely primitive both on account of heredity and on account of pre-natal experience; but in its general form it, no doubt, reverts toward the original status of mind. This original state, to which that of a very young infant is akin, was merely pain, which knew not itself nor its relation to other states, nor its relation to the external world, but was a wholly central subjective fact, and so was expressed only in wild and blind general movements. The very lowest types of psychic life which we can interpret seems to feel and nothing more. They do not feel at anything, and do not feel because they know, nor do they have definite kinds of feeling.

Pure feeling as bare pain and as undifferentiated pleasure is certainly far removed from our ordinary conscious experience, yet it may sometimes appear in a survival form, especially in sluggish states, in waking from sleep, and in recovering from anæsthetics. We are sometimes awakened by a dull pain which was evidently in its inception mere bare pain without differentiation. But in all such cases the pure pain or pure pleasure is but momentary, and is quickly swallowed up in a flood of manifold sensations. Many objects by many modes of sense at once invade and possess consciousness, and the early indefinite mode vanishes so quickly that we very rarely have time to note it by reflective consciousness.

But it is not merely in exceptional states of developed consciousness that we may trace the elementary form of feeling, but we may believe it to be fundamental to consciousness in general. It is natural for us who are so pervaded and dominated by sense of objectivity to see in it the causal element in mentality; feeling and will seem consequent to it, and we apprehend and feel accordingly. But the order of evolution was not from knowledge in any form to feeling, but the reverse, and we may suspect that in the completest analysis consciousness will still be found to obey its original law. If the rise of knowledge was at the instance of feeling, it is certainly unlikely that a fundamental order should be more than apparently reversed.

The order of consciousness is really the reverse of the order conceived by the objectifying consciousness, and this is a point where cognition by its very nature as objective may be said to obscure itself. To apprehend is to bring into relation, and the relation is very easily attributed to what is purely unrelated, to pure subjectivity. Thus here in the interpretation of merely subjective facts knowledge tends to stand in its own way. It is only objectively that the objectifying can appear causative of feeling; subjectively sense of object must always be taken as subsequent to a pleasure-pain psychosis. The object communicates or causes the feeling, but the subjective order is as such of necessity the opposite; the object does not come in view; there is no relating, until feeling has incited to it, and gradually the mind reaches out to an objective order from the purely central fact. In every psychical reaction there must be the purely central disturbance before the rebound to the actuality occasioning the disturbance. I must feel before I can discriminate or have any sense of the communication of the feeling. This means that when external objects are brought into relation with a wholly unanticipating consciousness, the first element in psychosis is always pure pleasure or pure pain. Thus, on a cold, dark day a sudden rush of sunlight on a blindfold man causes pleasure, then feeling warm, and then sense of warming object. The glow of pleasure and the pang of pain merely as such is in all cases precedent to any objective reference. Pure centrality of response, I thus take to be the initial element of all psychosis, primitive or developed. The first tendency in every consciousness is pure pain-pleasure, complete subjectivity which, however, in higher consciousness is so quickly lost through practically consentaneous differentiation that all traces of it seem wholly extinguished. Pure subjectivity must be pronounced the most evanescent of all characters in developed minds and yet the most constant. It is the inevitable precedent in every sensation and in every perception. We always experience pleasure or pain before the pleasurable or painful. A bright colour gives pleasure before we see it, and this pleasure incites to the seeing it. But so fully has the objective order been wrought into consciousness as a mode of interpretation that the great majority on reading the preceding sentence will mentally at first attribute sense of objectivity from the expression “bright colour gives pleasure,” as if there were pleasure at colour, a colour-pleasure, whereas is meant pleasure and nothing more,—bare, undifferentiated pleasure.

The objective statement, however true, is no measure of subjective fact, but this twisting of subjective fact to correspond with objective order is so embedded in language and common thought that it will perhaps always remain the form of ordinary thinking, like common-sense realism and geocentric appearance. The expressions, it pleased me, it pained me, and the common modes of speech in general, are fundamentally misleading. Pleasure and pain bring their objects, not objects pleasures and pains. Pleasure per se does not come for and in consciousness from the object,—though this is objective order—but the object for and in consciousness comes from the pleasure. Pleasure and pain always precede any cognizance of the thing, and it is only the combination of the two elements that constitutes pleasure or pain of or at a thing. The primitive element, the original feeling movement, also excludes subject as real object; both the “it” and “me” are not yet apparent; there is not yet identification of experience with subject or object, and in fact no sense of experience at all. The psychologist must retain common expressions, however, but, like the astronomer who retains such phrases as the sun rises, the sun sets, he must reverse common interpretation and correct natural error.

Guided by this principle we note an obvious error in the interpretation of child consciousness. If a bright-coloured object is passed before the eyes of a young infant we may conclude from its expression that a pleasure-consciousness is awakened, but we are probably quite at fault if we conceive it to have a consciousness of bright, and that this consciousness preceded and gave rise to pleasure and gave it a quale as pleasure-brightness. Sense of pleasure-object is manifested by appropriative activities, but in the very young, where these activities are lacking, the response to object is best regarded not as in any wise sense of object, nor even any kind of sensation, but as a pure subjectivity of pleasure. Of course the same remarks apply to the pain side of the child’s experience.

The purely subjective experience, while it becomes more and more evanescent factor as mind develops, yet always maintains its place as the initial point and vanishing-point of every psychosis. Every psychosis beyond the most primitive must be accounted a feeling-will-knowing group. These psychic forces exist in a correlated union generally comparable with the correlated activity of physical forces like electricity and heat. Each psychosis repeats in itself, in tendency form at least, the essential stages in the evolution of consciousness. Every psychosis rises from the pure pleasure-pain as the lowest level of mentality like a wave, and like a wave falls back into it again. Every wave of consciousness, whether it rises slowly or rapidly, whether it subsides gradually or violently, rises from pure subjectivity and comes back to it again. This absolutely simple feeling phase is accomplished so rapidly in ordinary human consciousness as to be rarely perceptible, but in lower consciousness it often exists as mood, as more or less permanent psychosis. The Brahmans attain artificially a subjectivity akin to this through their expertness in mental control and manipulation. They succeed in reducing and keeping consciousness in some very simple type, and their Nirvana may be considered as a state of pure subjectivity on the pleasure side. They, of course, cannot really attain this state or, at least, keep it, for pleasure is at bottom relative, yet they come to something approaching it. Pain at its height just before unconsciousness is reached, is always of the pure subjective type. In slow torture pain increases to a maximum intensity in pure pain, beyond which there is a gradual loss of intensity and consciousness in general, till ultimate failure of all consciousness. From the maximum intensity on to the end, consciousness is entirely subjective. Pleasure at its maximum attains only comparative subjectivity. Such facts tend toward a theory of mind which makes its original and fundamental act purely central; mind starts as in a germ which pushes outward till it penetrates space and time, but not in any reverse motion a pushing inward of a series of presentation forms.

We shall now notice certain of Mr. James Ward’s statements on primordial mind—in the article Psychology, Encyclopædia Britannica—in which he controverts feeling as original and simplest unit in mentality. Mr. Ward regards “the simplest form of psychical life” as involving “qualitatively distinguishable presentations which are the occasions of the feeling.” Presentation is primitive and initial in all consciousness, and cognition—feeling—will is the order for all mind. We always act as we are pleased or pained with the “changes in our sensations, thoughts, or circumstances” of which we are aware. Some presentation form is, throughout all our experience, the precursor and cause of feeling, and feeling can never be said to exist in a pure state as bare pleasure and pain totally without cognitive value.

On the contrary, I conclude from general considerations and from special indications in our own minds that pure pain is the original element, and that pure pleasure and pain are fundamental in all mind. Pure feeling arises from objects, indeed, but is still wholly unknowing of object and without qualitative aspect. Pure feeling is the constant incentive to all knowing and will activity. To say that I am pleased with a thing is to transform objective order into subjective fact. Pleasures and pains certainly come from things but this does not invariably rouse cognition of them as so coming, or of object as causative agent. The governing and essential fact of mind is always pure feeling, which, by reason of its perfect centrality, necessarily and naturally tends to elude observation. Every act of consciousness begins and ends with pure feeling, but mind, as far as it minds itself, is most apt to see only culminating phases rather than the obscure and inner forces which constituted long outgrown stages. The prominent facts of late consciousness are always very complex. Cognition as revealer unites with the known and inevitably, but strongly tends to regard itself as the determining and causative agent, whereas by its essence and function it is secondary. Cognition does not create its object, except in the view of a transcendental philosophy.

Mr. Ward asserts that phenomena of pleasure and pain involve change in consciousness with consciousness of change whereby we are pleased or pained. A changing presentation continuum is impressed upon mind, and it is by awareness of these changes that feelings are caused. This is certainly a complex mode to be assigned to all consciousness. This asserts that primarily consciousness merely happens in presentation form as determined from without, but I take it that the evolution of faculty is always acquirement, not mind determined, but mind determining, achieving its own growth in blind struggle. Mind is wholly an inward growth, not a series of givens; and presentations are accomplished not merely in it but by it. The fundamental principle is that while objects do determine conscious functions, it is only through self-conservative interest, through pleasure and pain reacting to them. All sensations, intuitions, presentations, are at bottom achievements as forced by law of struggle for existence. They do, indeed, seem to come of necessity and spontaneously to adult human consciousness, but developed faculty by virtue of being such does not have to attain beginnings.

But we note also this, that while all consciousness is change in the sense of being dynamic, of being an activity, this does not include consciousness of change. Consciousness as a changing factor is very distinct from consciousness of that change, and does not necessarily include or imply it. That the forms of activity which we group under the general term consciousness have their existence wholly in movement and change is true, but this does not necessitate that the changing elements should be aware of the change as such. Different things may be felt and known, but this does not always result in being known as different. This brings in comparison, consciousness of relation, which is certainly beyond primitive consciousness. In early mind we conceive that new elements are continually taking the place of the old, that change is incessant, yet without sense of the change. So far as the earliest consciousness is spasmodic and intermittent, appearing in isolated flashes, we cannot speak even of change in consciousness, much less of consciousness of change, for there is no continuous thread, no integration, consequently change is not in consciousness from a consciousness to a consciousness, but the only change is from a consciousness to unconsciousness. In the whole life of some organisms we may believe that only three or four pains or pleasures occur, entirely subjective and undifferentiated, and this collection of consciousnesses where state does not follow and influence state, where there is no complexity, is scarcely to be termed a consciousness which changes, much less that is aware of change. It is not improbable that even with civilized and educated men mind may sometimes lapse so far that changes occur with no awareness of change. In such sluggish conditions as when half asleep we may experience succession of consciousnesses without noting succession, each phase standing alone in itself and by itself. While consciousness is maintained as consciousness—that is, a continuance of conscious states—by the change, it is obviously not necessary to this that there should be awareness of change. Here as elsewhere we must keep clear of the mistake of making consciousness more than a general term for a group of phenomena. Consciousness as such has no reality or existence, but merely denominates a sum of consciousnesses. The phrase, change of consciousness, and similar expressions easily convey the impression that consciousness is a changing something. But we know that consciousness does not exist as a general indefinite something which changes or has other properties, but is merely a name for certain activities and functions.

The formula of Mr. Ward’s hardly applies to developed consciousness, much less to undeveloped. Consciousness even in man cannot be regarded as a something which changes in sensation and presentation forms as pure givens, determined with immediate completeness from without, and these changes perceived, and pleasure and pain result. On the contrary the immediateness and spontaneity of presentation forms in our ordinary adult human consciousness are in appearance only; they stand first before us because they have reached a dominance through heredity and education, but still the latent and inward order is always from feeling to knowledge and not vice versâ. The accomplishment of presentation is usually so marvellously rapid in perceptive beings, and acts upon such slight incentive that it is only under very rare conditions of regression, or when developing a new sense or new form of sense that we see that the moving element in mentality is pure feeling. Thus, for example, in being awakened from sound sleep by a bright light suddenly brought into the room, the order of consciousness is, pure feeling of pain, sensation of light, perception of lighted object, and not the reverse; whenever we can catch consciousness gradually awakening we can always identify this order. The lighted lamp, objectively speaking, certainly caused the feeling of discomfort with which consciousness began, and this feeling roused the mind to both sensation of light and perception of lamp. I, of course, have a feeling as to the visible object only after seeing it, but this is altogether distinct from the feeling which incites to the seeing. A vague, undifferentiated pain or pleasure is always initiative, but pure pleasure-pain is often so low in intensity that it does not start any cognitive act.

In a general way the influence of feeling and emotion upon cognitive act in higher psychical life is acknowledged by common observation. The wish is father to the thought—we see what we want to see. What we observe depends upon prepossession, interest, and the whole pleasure-pain tone. The mind must be determined to cognitive act by interest of some kind, and even for advanced consciousness with all its strength of inherited aptitude total loss of interest ultimately leads to loss of perceptive power. The impetus of all previous cognitive effort will carry on cognition, of any high order, at least, but a comparatively short time. Blot feeling out of life and all nature would soon become a dumb show and quickly fade into nothingness. Absolute passionless receptivity is impossible under the conditions of reality, and pure presentation forms never come as antecedent and causative to feeling. We have constantly to bear in mind that in the nature of the case the simplest elements and fundamental laws are hidden and certainly far from conspicuous in highly developed mind, which is an intricate nexus of feeling, will, and cognition constantly acting and reacting on each other.

As a general statement, then, impliedly as to mind in general, and implicitly as to the developed human mind, the proposition that consciousness is fundamentally aware of changes in itself as the basis and cause of all feeling is an assertion which may well be questioned. Certain it is that being “pleased or pained with the change” is not feeling in general, but a particular kind of feeling, namely, feeling of variety and novelty. Further, to be pleased with a thing for itself alone is not to be referred to pleasure or pain “with the change.” There is intrinsic pleasurableness and painfulness which does not come under the head of pleasure or pain of change. From both an a priori point of view of the law of self-conservation, and also from a brief survey of certain forms in comparative and human psychology, we incline towards accepting pure pain as the original consciousness which is very soon differentiated into excess and lack pain with evolution of pure pleasure. Will exists throughout as incited by feeling. Much, indeed, is to be done before this theory of the nature of mind is either fully elucidated or proved; but I believe that the assumption of mind as life function leads toward such a theory. Sensationalism and intuitionalism are both mistaken as to the origin and essence of mentality. Consciousness is not at bottom any mode of cognition, either as more or less freely accomplished by a “mind,” or as more or less mechanical impression from “things,” but it is primitively and fundamentally pain and pleasure as serving the organism in the struggle for existence. It is strange that evolutionary psychologists have so generally missed this point of view, and maintain sensationalism.

Comte, indeed, acutely remarks (Positive Philosophy, vol. 1, p. 463) that “daily experience shows that the affections, the propensities, the passions, are the great springs of human life; and that, so far from resulting from intelligence, their spontaneous and independent impulse is indispensable to the first awakening and continuous development of the various intellectual faculties.” He here assumes the introspection which he elsewhere denies as psychological method, and enunciates an important principle which he never carried out. Horwicz has made a survey of feeling as fundamental aspect of mind, but his discussion is physiological.

Our conclusions have been founded on general considerations and on the phenomena of growth of mind in general and particular. Another line of evidence would be decadent mind. Mental powers should decline and vanish in the reverse of the general order in which they arose; the order of disappearance should be the reverse of appearance, and if pain-pleasure be primitive, we should expect to find it both the first conscious element in infancy and the last in old age. The last stage of senility seems sensitive only to organic pleasures and pains. Further, old age does not so much seek pleasure as guard against pains, and this fact is in line with our treatment of pain as prior to pleasure and more fundamental than it. We may consider it likely that conscious life in the individual begins with a pain and ends with a pain. Senile psychology on this and other points is worthy of far more attention than it has received, for it is on the whole more accessible and trustworthy than infant psychology.

With regard to Mr. H. R. Marshall’s remarks (Philosophical Review, vol. 1, p. 632), it is sufficient to say that I lay no great emphasis on either pain or pleasure being the first fact of consciousness; but my main contention is that the primitive facts of consciousness are of the pain-pleasure type. While I have noticed some considerations as implying pain to be the first consciousness phenomenon, yet I am satisfied that pain and pleasure are correlative and complementary, each implying the other. Further, I do not regard pain as “primal sense,” but as primal fact. Pain is not in any wise a sense, and sense of pain can only mean capacity for pain, or actual pain experience.

Again, I do not, as Mr. Marshall implies, regard pain as the differentiating basis of subsequent evolution, but rather as mere prius and impetus, and hence I do not look for pain-pleasure to disappear with mental evolution, nor yet to mark divisions in “sensational phenomena”; but it will ever remain in representative forms, at least, as increasingly complex stimulant of all mental life.

The objection urged by Höffding and others to the primitive nature of pure feeling is that we sense before we feel pain or pleasure; thus we have the sensation of touch before we feel the pain from contact with a hot stove; we feel the pin, then the pricking sensation, then the pain. This precedence has been measured by Beau and others.

But what is the significance of these well-recognised facts? Do they show that pain-pleasure originates always in sensation? What is the origin of tactile power? How and why was the first tactile effort made, if not at impulse of some pain-pleasure? When conscious life was at pre-tactile stage—before it had learned to touch—it had no pain from touch, but it had pain. We can scarcely deny that a pre-tactile stage exists, that all sensation was originally a sensing—an exertive act, that it did not come, but was attained; for all the growth of sensitive power in the race proceeds thus at present, and the law of present psychic development in this regard seems general. But it is pain-pleasure which forces all action; here is the impulse which brings exertion whether as sensing or otherwise. A doctrine of spontaneity is against the general law of development by struggle. It is certainly true that, standing with my back to the stove and inadvertently coming in contact, I, without any previous pain-pleasure impulse and without exertion, have sense of touch, then pain. But this spontaneity is not original factor; it is the result of inherited powers. When tactility has become a well-developed power and is handed down to descendants, then contact with things is immediately and spontaneously realized in the form of touch, which contact would originally have been unnoticed. That is, the severest condition—a red hot stove—would impress the lowest psychism only in terms of mere pain, and so result in general reactions of minimum service. The early psychism which is just in process of achieving sense of touch would have pain, and then with effort touch the object and thus attain some more special reaction of more particular service. But the tactile, like all sensing activity is anticipatory, it is a finder, an interpreter. Suppose I bring a very fine needle toward your eye, you may see it and avoid it; but suppose your eyes are shut the eye comes in contact with the needle, and you have sensation of touch; but you are sound asleep, then pricking sensation may wake you as needle proceeds deeper, but in profoundest sleep undefined pain may be the first consciousness to result. Now the needle might be so small as to be seen with great difficulty by the waking man, or invisible, or to be touched with great difficulty; but this stage of exertive action for the sense is only relative, and in the history of mind the very grossest forms were at one time only dimly seen by intensest effort, and lower still, touched only by intensest effort. Seeing originated in looking, and passive touch in active touch, as moved by interest or direct pleasure-pain. Now pain is not in the mere sight or touch, but is suggested by them. The whole order—seeing, touching, feeling prick, feeling pain—is the reverse of evolution order. The rational mode, then, of interpreting the origin of any sense, whether tactile, visual or other, is not by receptivity, but through struggle at critical stage when great pain is actual or imminent. Thus, if the conditions of life required the development of a special sense of magnetism, it would surely arise by strongest effort, as, indeed, all progress in special sensitiveness is now being accomplished. Thus, the anticipatory and premonitory function of sense does not make it original, rather the contrary; it is guide and significant of pain-pleasure.

It is obvious that the cognitive tendency once established becomes an instinct of objectivity and governs the whole mentality. This is obviously the case with man. He does not exist in that sluggishness and semi-consciousness where pain-pleasure must arise as primitive impulse, but by habit and instinct he is passively and actively cognitive. The eye is continually seeing things spontaneously, the hand touching, but as to some very small object we have to exert effort to see or touch, and this was undoubtedly the mode by which all seeing and touching arose. It is because generations of ancestors actively sensed, that we automatically sense; the tendency has become ingrained in mind. So it is that man is predominantly sensing, is continually and naturally awake to objective conditions, is constantly anticipatory, and so normally senses before he feels pain-pleasure. However, a man in a “brown study,” inadvertently touching a hot stove, has pain, then warmth, then touch sensation, and actively realizes these. So in deep slumber mentality often begins with pain-pleasure. At bottom the reason we have pain from a sensing is because we had originally pain-impulse to that sensing, and the pain therewith. Thus tactility, arising as effortful sensing, was produced by pain from thing to be touched, to be sensed in its experimental value. By innumerable painful experiences with hot things, the hot thing is tactilily appreciated; and as touching is actively pursued by organism on the alert, the associated pain is more and more quickly realized from given object. In origin pain was felt from the hot thing in contact, before either sense of warmth or contact was sensed; it was this pain that forced to sensing and development of cognition, which, however, ultimately became habit, and things were constantly appreciated and anticipated. Thus the touch-warmth-pain order is established. Sense is significant of pain-pleasure, but the pain-pleasure came not at first from the sensing, but the contrary; sensing was determined by it, and became correlated with it, and became sign of it. The progress is from initial subjectivity to an instinctive constant objectivity. This objectivity is reflected in all objective expression as language; “the heat was painful,” “it hurt”; the “it” being tactual thing, etc., etc. However, if we look for primitive consciousness, we must find it only in primitive organisms in their primitive stage, and in man most rarely only as tendency in profound relapse. We must mark this, that cognition is not to be evolved out of feeling, but at instance of feeling as impelling the knowing effort or volition.

We may suppose that primitive consciousness still exists in the lowest types of life, but it may also be the sub-consciousness in the higher types. Viewed biologically, what is sub-consciousness?

The earliest living aggregations attain but a very slight degree of common life, and very slowly do the cells, under the pressure of serviceability in the struggle for existence, give up their independency and become interdependent, each thereby giving up some functioning to be done for it by others, and in turn functioning for others. Thus it is but slowly that a stomach is specialised, the cells in general in the organism long retaining and exercising some digestive function, which is properly termed sub-digestion. In this way a soup bath gives nourishment. If psychic function specializes gradually like other functions, we shall have in the same way a sub-form here, a sub-consciousness which stands for lower centres, and not for the whole organism as such. The wider, higher, and more specialized psychic centre does not at once extinguish the lower.

Now what is a high organism but an involved series of combinations of combinations? With every new integration a higher plane is achieved, and the vital process has a wider functioning: but the physical or psychical activity so far as it does not pass over into the service of the new and higher whole remains as sub-function. With every new stage in evolution the integrating psychic factors only partially lose themselves in effecting a common psychism for the new whole, a sub-consciousness and a sub-sub-consciousness, etc., are still carried on in survival. In man, physiologically speaking, it is the brain consciousness which is general. But we need not suppose this to extinguish all the lower ganglionic consciousness from which and by which it arose. If psychic function be correlative with other function, we must expect in man a vast amount of survival sub-mentality which, while not the mind of the man, is yet mind in the man. The individual knows necessarily only the general consciousness, for this only is his consciousness and constitutes his individuality, yet the doctrine of evolution would call for a vast deal of undiscoverable simple consciousness which never rises to the level of the whole organism’s consciousness. A cell or a group of cells may be in pain and yet there be no pain in the individual’s consciousness, and so unknown to this general consciousness.

We have intimated that primitive consciousness may occur in a sub-conscious way in the highest organisms. But can this sub-consciousness ever be more than mere survival in its nature? or may it play essential part as basis of higher manifestations? If the integration of mentality is like other integration,—e.g. material which is based on molecular and atomic activity—it will be bound up in the activity of psychic units, which can be none other than sub-consciousness. That is, any common or general consciousness when looked at from below, and analytically is the dynamic organic whole of elements; it is a product of activities which are on another plane from itself. Roughly illustrated, I may say that my finger feels pain before I do. We conceive that at a certain intensity a sub-consciousness tends to rouse a general consciousness, and for a time maintain it; and losing intensity, the general consciousness disappears leaving only the sub-consciousness, which may long outlast the general form.

Sub-consciousness, whether as survival or basal, is put beyond our direct observation, but it remains a necessary biological and psychological hypothesis. Here is exemplified for psychosis that law of the aggregation of units in hierarchical order, that wheel within wheel structure of the universe, upon which I have touched in Mind, ix. pp. 272-3.

CHAPTER III
THEORIES OF PLEASURE-PAIN

The bearing of our studies on a theory of the conditions of pleasure-pain is obvious. If we consider pure feeling as the primary, fundamental, and conditioning mentality, it stands before all other mentality, and cannot be interpreted as conditioned. Pain as primum mobile is not intrinsically dependent on any other psychosis. Hence we run counter to the Herbartian School, which maintains that psychism exists from the first for itself as intellectual ideational activity, and that pleasure-pain is but reflex of the efficiency and ease, or the inefficiency and difficulty of this activity. The checking of the current of ideas may give a pain, but our exposition has been that pain arose before ideas or presentations of any kind, and long before any interference could be felt as pain.

Again, if we say “all pain comes from tension” (Mind, xii. p. 6), we have to ask, Tension of what? If we say tension of sensation or ideation, this is Herbartianism merely. How also can tension be felt as painful, except through sensation of tension, which is a feeling of intense sensation—obviously a late psychosis? And certainly pain is more than a general consciousness fatigue. And further stress and strain result in pain, because we imply these as painful activities by the very notion of the words. A stress or strain is assumedly painful activity, but this is not explanation. But apart from this, if the organism felt pain merely as direct result of struggling and straining, it would cease activity; activity and evolution would stop. It may be that by tension is not meant a mode of consciousness, but of nervous or muscular activity; but as we are now considering psychosis only as conditioning pure feeling, we leave this aspect for discussion till a little later. But on the psychical side, that all pain is a by-product of over-intense consciousness, intellectual or volitional, that the origin and development of pain is in a mental intensity which has gone beyond a certain point, this seems, on general evolutionary grounds, unlikely. Here, indeed, is merely a very particular and rather late mode of pain. And may not pains themselves attain an intensity which is itself painful? It must be acknowledged, however, that the whole doctrine as to consciousness intensity, its nature, reactions, laws, and measurements is very obscure.

Again, as to the theory that pleasure-pain is reflex of quantity of consciousness, that pleasure results from mental expansion, pain from mental contraction, this must, like the intensity theory, be considered as putting a late and special form as covering all forms. Mentality here exists for itself, and conscious self-development—a very late mode—is presupposed. The promotion of large complete free consciousness, the sense of progress and of unimpeded mental activity, certainly conveys high joys to certain choice natures, but they do not touch the vast majority of even human minds, much less animal. With the stolid an expanding consciousness is painful. Consciousness only as conscious of itself, and as self-developing, reaches a pleasure or pain as a felt furtherance or hindrance of its own expansion.

All reflex theories take us above the realm of simple consciousness acting directly for life, and this is the very form which seems commonest, and which appears to be full of passing pleasures and pains. That consciousness does react on itself in late phases is plain, but if consciousness, like other functions, has developed from the extremely simple to the extremely complex, this self-reaction cannot be regarded as primitive. Not till consciousness becomes integrated as a manifold organism do pleasure and pain become prominent as reflexes. We are not now looking for the functional value of pleasure and pain in mind itself as an independent whole; but regarding its functional quality and that of all mentality in life values, and here the functional meaning of such reflexes is secondary. In mind, as organic continuous whole, pleasure-pain is both resultant and excitant; it stands related to an antecedent state and it is stimulant to following states. Its function is excitant and it is the starting point of all other mentality, both originally and in the later manifestation. The having pleasure-pain is what starts both motor and cognitive volition.

It has, indeed, been maintained that while pleasure-pain is not a product or concomitant of some psychosis, as sensation, it is itself a sensation, a definite mode of sensibility. I have a pain sense just as I have a temperature sense, I feel pain in the same way as I feel warm, and by the analogous sensory nerves. With reference to this theory we must ask, since sensation is correspondent to modes of objects, to what mode is pain correspondent? Sense responds to modes of object, as light, and sonorous vibrations; but pain is not based on any such mode of objects. If pain were, there would have been long since a department of physics, which would have treated that basis just as it treats light, heat, sound, etc. But we all know that an object is not painful or pleasing in the same way that it is warm or cold, heavy or light. I do not say the stone feels heavy and painful, but I do say the stone feels painfully heavy, that is feeling pain is not a state of awareness. Further, having pain or pleasure is not by any sensing effort. I do not try to feel pain as I try to see the light of a star or feel the warm spot in a bar of iron. To be sure, the doctor asks his patient, “do you feel any pain?” and after a moment’s delay the answer may be, “yes,” but this is not in the nature of a sensing effort, but merely an attentiveness to bodily conditions as affecting mental state, not an objective attention but an analytical self-attention. Still further, a neural basis for pleasure-pain is altogether likely, but even if these nerves were found to be generally distributed over the body, this would not prove sensation, but merely that pleasure-pain is functional throughout the organism, diffusive organic consciousness. If pleasure-pain is primitive, and neurality and mentality correlate, the earliest nerve structure—ganglion—was a pleasure-pain organ. However, the sensory motor predominance is so early and complete that the current theory, as the more objective, is the natural physiologic interpretation.

Again, it has been maintained that pleasure-pain is not a definite state of consciousness, but a quality like intensity, a modus which must belong to all states. But if we assign pleasure-pain to such a category as intensity we must define just what we mean by this category. Is intensity a mere objective quality which we as observers assign to all psychosis, just as we do to electrical or luminous phenomena? or is it inherent element, an actual constituent, of every psychosis? If a man is angry and becomes more angry, intensity is increased; but we may conceive that he simply is more angry without being aware of this change of intensity, that is without every change of intensity being noted by consciousness. As introspection avers, it often happens that a man is both unconscious of his anger and unconscious of its increase. As I have frequently had occasion to note, simple natures are wholly unconscious of their emotions and of their intensity variations. That is, as matter of fact, intensity of feeling is not feeling of intensity. If you feel warm you feel differently than when you feel warmer, but this is no more than saying that when the iron is hot it is in a different state than when it is hotter. Intensity means the same in both cases. Consciousness, primitively, at least, is not self-awareness of its own changes in intensity. The feeling warm and the feeling warmer occur simply as facts which are subjectively unrelated and unmeasured by the consciousness which has the varying intensities. I strike a cow hard—result, intense pain; harder, more intense pain; this is correlative with, I strike iron, intense tremor; harder, more intense tremor. The cow experiences more intense pain, but does not consciously measure it off as such. I can say, “I feel hotter than I did,” but the cow does not appreciate and express its own sense of its experience. The language fallacy leads us astray. By our very use of terms, warm and warmer, and by our discussion of the matter, we imply a consciousness of intensity which is far from being primitive or general. It would probably be an overestimate to say that the intensity of one in a thousand psychoses makes itself felt as such in consciousness.

That consciousness is not always conscious of its own intensity is then shown by direct introspection. And in general we must observe that every psychosis has its own intensity, which intensity may or may not be noted by a consciousness of intensity. If there come a consciousness of intensity, this consciousness has its own intensity, which may be noted by a new consciousness, whose intensity may in like manner be noted by a new consciousness, etc., ad infinitum. That is, a consciousness is never its own intensity, and intensity is never a consciousness, such as pain or pleasure, but is mere comparative objective quality.

Again, consciousness has almost from the first different degrees of activity, but it would be most unlikely that so complex an act as consciousness conscious of its own intensity should be primitive and early. Also, if consciousness develops as life factor it must be immediate utility which determines its early forms. Hence on this general principle of biologic evolution it is most unlikely that primitive organisms will both have consciousnesses and consciousness of their intensity, for of what direct and vital value is this intensity-consciousness as psychic mode? On the other hand it is obviously desirable that psychoses should early differentiate intensity as objective quality, i.e., without self-awareness of it, should have different degrees of a psychosis to meet different degrees of requirement; thus to fear strongly or weakly according to necessity of the case. To have fear set at one pitch for all cases is perhaps absolutely primitive, but differentiation is early. But to fear more or less, i.e., at different intensities, is not to have intensity as subjective element, an actual psychosis constituent appreciated as such, which is very late evolution since the demand for it is late. In thus defining the category of intensity we have plainly isolated it from the pleasure-pain category. We know pleasure or pain as act of consciousness just as we know volition or sensation. Pain and pleasure are definite facts like seeing or touching or willing, and are so recognised by common consciousness. One or the other may be involved in all experience, but this does not make them general qualities like intensity. Pain is a consciousness, intensity is not a consciousness. This is the immediate value of the terms, the very names convey distinctness of category. I have a pain, I do not have an intensity; I am in pain, I am not in intensity. My pain is intense, but I cannot say my intensity is painful. We experience pain and pleasure, but we never experience intensity.

This quale hypothesis as presented by Marshall in Pain, Pleasure and Aesthetics, is set upon the dangerous foundation of ignorance, viz.[viz.], of the neural basis of pleasure-pain, and of causes of its variability. It is as yet disputed whether a nerve organ for pleasure-pain has been found; but if one is generally acknowledged, the theory would be overthrown. Greater intensity in any psychosis, as sensation of warmth, means simply greater nervous activity in the particular nerves subserving the psychosis, in this case the temperature nerves. So also pleasure-pain as general concomitant like intensity must mean merely some general mode of nervous activity as yet unknown, if we allow it any nervous basis at all. Again, the variability of pleasure-pain for a given content, the fact that the taste of olives is at one time pleasant, at another, unpleasant, suggests that pleasure-pain is like intensity merely a general quality, which must in one form or another attach to all psychoses. But this does not explain anything. What we want to know is why in any given case we have pleasure and not pain; we do not wish to be put off with a general statement that the nature of pleasure-pain is such that we may have either, which is akin to the old metaphysical method of abstract explanation; making the rationale of the lion leoninity is not unlike the hypothesis that explains pleasure-pain in all its variations by variability as its nature. We have a scientific faith that variability is not a general unexplainable quality, but that there is for every case of pleasure-pain a definite rationale based in the facts of life demand and life history. That olives now give pleasure, and now give pain, is based upon definite conditions of physical state which are very complex, but which can be revealed by patient research alone.

Any theory of pleasure-pain then from the point of view of pure psychology, as explaining it by reference to other modes of consciousness, is, we think, unsatisfactory. But perhaps the physiological point of view will be more satisfactory. It is generally considered that the function and origin of pain is in what is unfavourable to physiological function, of pleasure, in what is favourable. I cut my finger, and the pain says, stop the injurious action. However, there are exceptions. I taste sugar of lead; it is pleasant, and I keep on tasting, and am poisoned. Lotze explains that this sweetness is immediately soothing and advantageous. “We must not regard pleasure,” says Grant Allen, as “prophetic.” But what has been the evolution of taste as sensing act except to be “prophetic,” to give at the opening of the alimentary canal a monitor to the stomach and other digestive organs? That it tastes sweet, that this taste is pleasant, and so the substance is swallowed, or that it tastes bitter and unpleasant, and the substance is rejected; this surely is anticipatory and “prophetic.” The taste for sweetness is not evolved for itself; but for its life value; and hence Lotze’s explanation fails from the point of view of evolutionary psychology. The organic sweet is the nutritious and beneficial, and the sensing this quality in connection with these favourable and pleasant effects on the stomach and organism as a whole has led to a taste and liking for sweetness. “Sweet and wholesome” is the common and just conception. But if mineral sweets injurious to life, like sugar of lead, had been a common environment, and the only sweet known, this sweetness would have been as unpleasant as the sour or acid now is. We see even now that sweets that have several times caused nausea, though at first highly agreeable, come to be distasteful and disgustful. We now find that sour and bitter substances are disliked by animals in general as painful, for the sour and bitter is general sign of the unwholesome; but those animals which live almost exclusively on bitter herbs undoubtedly appreciate this quality as we do a bon bon. Men lost in a desert by pertinaciously tasting bitter herbs and becoming dependent upon them for support would soon realize their bitterness as pleasant, and a race might originate to whom sweetness would be unpleasant. Hence the value of a sensation does not—in natural evolution—lie in itself, it is merely a guide and index; and the sensation quality will be pleasant or unpleasant according to its relation to the demands of life. A sensation is inherently either pleasurable or painful, but not essentially one and not the other, hence the proverb, de gustibus non disputandum. The sensing act in itself is indifferent, i.e., sweetness and bitterness, purely as tastes, as sensing acts, are indifferent; but as matter of fact having grown up with and for pleasure-pain tones as indicative of life values, they are either one or the other according to their relation to life. Where sense serves not life but itself, as with the epicure, a new order of pleasures and pains is determined which is not within our present scope of discussion.

This variability of pleasure-pain tone of sensations even under natural evolution shows that the main force at least of their pleasurability or the contrary does not lie in the affection of the sense organ itself. If a given sensation, for example, bitterness, were painful in all degrees only because of its harmfulness to the sense organ, how could this variability be explained? We consider that the tasting bitterness, for example, arose through painful stomachic and bowel experience with herbs which had this quality, and which by sensing efforts were so cognized at length, and pain connected by its very origin with sense of bitterness, which becomes in all degrees painful. The identifying the nutritiously harmful weed by tasting its bitterness has the pain quality of its effects, since the tasting has grown up in connection with its effects. It is out of actual injurious and painful experiences that the organism is led to put out sensing effort and to reach such a sensation as that of a bitter taste whose pain value is mainly, at least, due to the actual results of the substance lower down in the alimentary canal. A sense of bitterness becomes disagreeable in all degrees, for in its inception, when first sensed, it has its connection with the pain effects which stimulate this sensing. To discriminate the unnutritious or poisonous by tasting is a grand achievement, securing the rejection at the very opening, the mouth of the alimentary canal, in place of rejection by nausea from the stomach itself. The organism which could only know that a certain substance was bad for it by very painful nausea, now knows its badness by the comparatively painless tasting bad. Whatever tastes bad, is bad.

The chief difficulty of the theory of bodily advantage and disadvantage as conditioning pleasure and pain comes not from any such instance as the sugar of lead phenomenon; but it lies in the fact that life progressiveness, enlargement, specialization, that which is to the highest profit of life, is uniformly reached only by painful struggle. It is only by intense struggle, by supremest, painfullest effort, that those new psychic forms are initiated and developed which are of the utmost service to the organism. The act of adjustment to a new circumstance is so extremely difficult and painful that it is attempted by few and achieved by very few of any set of organisms. By an act of most painful struggle the fittest survive; and the rest, the vast majority, who could not key themselves to that pitch, perish. Adjustment to the ordinary conditions is simply a free using of intelligence and energy integrated and stored by ancestors when these conditions were new to them. The adjustments which are so spontaneously made by new-born animals as response to environment were once new, and secured and integrated for inheritance by the most painful and persistent effort. Such is the inertia and conservatism of life that while it moves spontaneously in grooves already made, it does not rejoice in the toil of real progress. The struggle by which the greatest life advances have been accomplished has always been intensely painful in itself, whatever the aftermath of pleasure may be, the pleasure of achievement and creation, the satisfaction at successful effort, which is plainly a very late psychosis.

The origin and place of pleasure is indicated by these considerations. Though function is generated and developed by severest painfullest struggle, yet the reward is pleasurability of the free functional activity; and the more manifold the functioning built up, the more manifold the pleasure. Thus it is that a highly complex organism like man, which represents many psychic ages of painful function building, has a very high pleasure capacity. Every new adaptation when integrated means a new pleasure. It is pleasurable to inhale fresh, cool air, but the lung functioning itself has been built up by painful exertion in the struggle for existence. Pleasure as reflex of functioning is merely then conserving power. The immediately and intrinsically pleasure-giving acts are not progressive, but merely hold life at the given and already acquired status. But the most and largest pleasure is in the mere expenditure of stored energy. The easiest way, the way of inclination and obvious direct pleasure is regressive. It is living upon the past, living upon accumulated capital bequeathed, and perhaps in some measure acquired. The use of a stimulant, as alcohol, enables the capital to be used up faster. As the systemic craving becomes greater with the drunkard, the pleasure increases, and on the brink of dissolution he may reach the extremest pleasure. In alcoholism the more injurious the drink, the more violent the pleasure. The most rapid and destructive using up of vital force in lust, revenge and other excitements gives the keenest pleasure. The orgy, the chase, the prize ring, give the expensive “thrill,” which is ecstatic pleasure. Debauchery and alcoholism are quick ways of using the pleasure capacity which has been built up by painful effort of thousands of generations. A taste sensation, which was achieved as the highest effort of genius by some very remote ancestor at a critical moment and attained by painful sensing exertion, is finally after generations of severe volition integrated, and becomes spontaneous activity, and reactive as free pleasurable functioning. That is, in the early stages of tasting the pleasure taken in it was by discriminating effort, a pleasure realized by exertion as pleasures of artistic “taste” are now enjoyed by many people; which pleasure may at length be so inwrought into psychism that it occurs spontaneously. At least, we have no other clue to the origin of pleasures except by judging from the present development of definite pleasures in the case of man, which pleasures come only by effortful cultivation, for instance, the highest pleasures of art. The whole range of sense pleasures have been built up and capacity therefore has been inherited, and may be used up with great intensity.

The largest and keenest sort of pleasures is from expenditure. Yet storage in certain modes yields a moderate pleasure, as the pleasure of rest, dozing after exercise. Here is a general spontaneous accumulation of physical pleasure capacity, it is a case where functional repair has become automatic, and thus far is analogous to the spontaneity of pleasures of expenditure. But these storage pleasures are mainly negative, relief only; and they are not the great positive corporeal pleasures which are so largely sought. The drunkard gradually recovering from a spree experiences feelings of relief, but he does not indulge in his cups to feel the gradual recovery from the painful after effects.

No biologic or psychologic theory of pleasure and pain can yet be enunciated which is fully explanatory. In fact, if pleasure-pain is the primitive and fundamental fact, if it constitutes the worth of life and is life, then it must explain other factors, but remain itself unexplained. The theory of advantage and disadvantage fails signally, for the most pleasurable act is frequently the most disadvantageous to the interests of the organism, and the most advantageous—progressive effortful volition—is invariably most painful. As to why the way of conservation and upbuilding should be painful, why pleasure should not be inherent in the progressive struggle rather than pain, is, at least for the present, a philosophical problem; but the fact remains. We have considered that struggle is pain-impelled and painful, and that pleasure is resultant of functioning thereby established, and that all pleasure capacity is painfully acquired. With the grand exception of this singular and important fact, however, we can say that in natural evolution—that is, before mind has become independent and artificial and subjected itself to pathologic tendencies—the general law that pleasure denotes favouring organic conditions, pain, unfavourable, may be assumed. However, if the body is mere dependency and expression of mind, the form of statement must be reversed; that is, a given pain or pleasure is an acquirement by mind in its function building. I have painful taste sensation of bitter, pleasant sensation of sweet, not as originally reflex of bodily conditions, but the sensing power and the organ, like all bodily specialization, is outcome of mind as struggle. A typical consciousness—series of a low type which places pleasure in its place is: pain (as from hunger)—struggle-sensing (as touching for food)—desire (when food is recognised through sensing)—absorptive and digestive effort and action—pleasure—struggle to continue and increase pleasure—slight satiety pain—unconsciousness of sleep. So we do not connect pleasure-pain as outcome of organic function in general or particular, but function is outcome of pleasure-pain. It determines function, and not function it. The feelings which prompted and developed a functioning, and the correlate total—organism—necessarily involve a very high complex, at least for any late psychism, and make a general law of pleasure-pain impossible to determine under present conditions. The rationale of particular pleasures and pains can only be reached through a thorough investigation of life history, an investigation which in present circumstances seems in most cases beyond our powers. A great mass of psychological data, and not any general theory, is the desideratum.

CHAPTER IV
THE RELATION OF FEELING TO PLEASURE-PAIN

Should the term Feeling be made to include certain states of consciousness which are neither pleasurable nor painful? Or should all such neutral states be designated by some other term? We are concerned here with an important matter of definition which implies an extensive analysis of consciousness with reference to pleasure and pain. It will not be difficult to find many so-called feelings which are neutral, or seem to be so; but it is the duty of the psychologist to carefully analyse all such states, and point out the proper use of the term Feeling.

Common observation neglects minute analysis, and is unreliable when it speaks of certain indifferent states as feelings. When a man speaks of feeling queer, or strange, or bewildered, or surprised, and says that the state of mind seemed neither agreeable nor disagreeable, we may suspect that by a perfectly natural tendency he is extending the name Feeling to closely-connected states of cognition or will. In identification and definition common observation is for all sciences notoriously untrustworthy, and especially in psychology; so on this question the evidence of language and popular testimony counts for little one way or the other. This is strikingly evident when people speak of feeling indifferent as to some matter, meaning that they have no feeling on the matter. The term Feeling is used in such a broad and vague way that ‘I feel indifferent’ means ‘I am indifferent,’ ‘I have no feeling.’ The mistake here is in using the word Feeling as an equivalent to Ego, or any quality of Ego. A feeling of indifference is no feeling at all. Popular evidence then, I believe, can be no guide in this matter. In passing, I may also say that the very abundant use of analogy by some writers on this subject seems to me ill-advised. Analogy does very well to bring up the rear, but it is often very useless and confusing as an advance-guard.

Prof. Bain (Mind, No. 53) insists that ideas tend to actualise themselves by neutral intensity or excitement, which is feeling; or rather, he says, a “facing-both-ways condition.” This last expression is certainly not very helpful or satisfactory. Prof. Bain admits that typical will is incited by pleasure and pain, but he maintains that sometimes, as notably in imitation, will is stimulated by purely neutral excitement or feeling. In the discussion of this subject much has been said about excitement, and, as Mr. Sully has suggested, this requires careful definition.

Reflection assures us that every mental activity has a certain intensity, and the word Excitement may, in the most general sense, denote this intensity. The intensity may be so slight as to be unnoticed by the subject, and remain wholly unindicated to the keenest observer; or it may be so strong as to be perfectly evident to both; or it may be evident to the subject and not to the observer, or vice versâ. Thus the obvious division of Excitement from this point of view is into subjective, where it is immediately recognised and felt in the consciousness of the subject, and objective, where it is unnoticed, or noticed only by observer. Classifying by another principle, we may distinguish Cognition-intensity, Feeling-intensity and Will-intensity, and the natural subdivisions under these according to the accepted subdivisions of mental activities. Excitement is not, however, generally used in the large sense we have just mentioned, but as denoting intensity of a high degree so as to be very noticeable to the subject, or observer, or both.

It is plain that Excitement, as subjective intensity, is the only kind which bears on the question under discussion. It is with excitement as a feeling, viz., the feeling of intensity, and not with excitement as quality of feeling, that is, intensity, that we have to deal, and it is necessary that this distinction be clearly borne in mind. One may be excited but not feel excited, may have intensity of feeling but not feeling of intensity. Using the term, then, as equivalent to feeling of intensity, it is to be noted that it is a reflex or secondary mental state. It is the feeling resulting from consciousness of intensity of consciousness. The intensity of any consciousness may increase to such a point that it pushes itself into consciousness, first as mere recognition of intensity, but immediately and most manifestly as feeling of intensity. In rapid alternations of contrasted states, as of hope and fear, intensity soon rises to such a degree that it forces its way into consciousness as feeling of intensity. This feeling of intensity may be itself either weak or intense. In very reflective natures, the cognition and feeling of intensity may be reflex at any power: there may be cognition of the intensity of cognition-of-intensity, etc., in indefinite regression. Most persons stop with the single step in the regression.

It is evident that as far as excitement is regarded merely as intensity, as a fundamental element in all feeling and mental action, it is a confusion of terms to apply quality to it, to speak of it as either pleasurable, or painful, or neutral. Intensity of mental action has degrees but not quality, just as pitch in sound has degree, but not timbre or quality. Regarding excitement as feeling-of-intensity, it has the general characteristics of all feelings, and is not more likely to be neutral than any other feeling.

Taking the case of surprise, which is so frequently instanced as a neutral feeling, let us analyse it with special reference to the excitement as feeling of intensity of cognition. A typical case would be the surprise from hearing thunder in January. The presentation is quickly compared with a representation of observed order of facts, and the disagreement of the two marked. This is so far purely cognitive activity; but immediately connected with the perception of disagreement is the forcible recognition of the breaking up of a more or less rigid order. There is a disturbance in cognitive activity and the tension breaks into consciousness as excitement, the feeling of intensity. The conflict of a settled conviction with recent presentation intensifies consciousness, and this intensity with the abrupt change in quantity and quality of mental activity breaks into consciousness as intellectual sense of shock accompanied and closely followed by feeling of unpleasantness and pain. It is to be noted that when we come upon the feeling-element in surprise we find pain. Surprise in the strict sense is then the reflex act of consciousness in which the mind becomes aware of and feels the sudden disturbance and tension set up in itself by the sudden weakening of an established belief. The painful shock has some relation to the force of the disturbing factor, but is more closely connected with the strength of the belief assailed. The feeling of the disagreement as pain is due to the fact that this disagreement impinges on subjectivity, personal opinion and conviction, and the disturbance will be more or less disagreeable according to the degree of personal interest. Note that by exact statement the feeling is not painful, but is the pain concomitant or resultant upon the mental perception. The surprise for a person of rather weak habit of mind and of little generalising power will be almost wholly intellectual. Disagreement will be noted, but not felt. For one of strong intellectual interest, the surprise will mean definite and acute pain. For a meteorologist who has written a book stating that in this latitude thunder does not occur in January the surprise might be very grievous. The intellectual element in surprise is emphasized in the statement “I am surprised,” the feeling-element in “I feel surprised.” If antecedent states of representation, comparison and inner perception are placed under the term feeling-of-surprise, we may expect consequent states to be likewise easily confused. When one speaks of being agreeably or disagreeably surprised, the pleasure or pain is not really, however, a part of the surprise. The sense and feeling of intellectual destruction, which constitutes surprise, is so quickly and thoroughly swallowed up in pleasure in having hope realized, or in pain in having fear realized, as the event may prove, that the term is naturally applied to what engrosses attention. Thus, “It was a very pleasant surprise” means “The surprise was followed by very pleasant consequences.” When I am surprised by the arrival of an intimate friend whom I supposed a thousand miles away, the mental disagreement, and the pain from conflict of conception and perception, are quickly eliminated by the event according with desire, and by the mind anticipating joys. We see, then, how easily the antecedents and consequents of surprise are confounded with surprise itself, which is the reflex act of consciousness recognising and feeling sudden disturbance in intensity, quality and quantity in cognitive activity. I conclude that surprise, as feeling, is pain coloured by cognition of shock and by volition to avoid disturbing element.

Absorption in thought may be attended by what seems to be neutral excitement, but is not really so. The intensity of thought may press into consciousness as a knowledge and feeling of intensity, but so far as it is a feeling it is indubitably pleasure or pain. This pleasure or pain may remain as continuous undertone with frequently repeated intrusion into full consciousness. Careful analysis in this case shows that apparent neutrality results from a strong attendant recognition, or from the natural volitions being quickly overruled by feelings consequent upon other considerations. Intellectual men are not apt to be guided by excitement. Professor Bain says that imitation is a test-case, that this is a volition which is obviously stimulated by neutral feeling. In some cases imitation seems clearly a mechanical, ideo-motor affair, an instinctive action without either conscious feeling or willing. In all other cases of imitation analysis will show excitant pleasure or pain. As Preyer and others have shown in the case of young children, mimicry arises mainly from pleasure in activity as such, and not from its peculiar quality as imitation. For children, and often for adults, imitation is simply a method of joyous and novel activity. The stimulant in higher grades of imitation is pleasure in attainment. As far as excitement is stimulant, it is, on the general principle before stated, either pleasure or pain. The pleasant feeling of intensity will tend toward continuance of imitative action, the unpleasant toward discontinuance. The pleasurable sense of activity, as inciting and continuing will in imitation, is a good example of excitement as feeling of volition-intensity.

If volitional excitement as instanced in imitation, and cognitive excitement, as exemplified in surprise and absorption of thought, cannot be termed neutral, it is quite unlikely that we shall find any neutral feeling-excitement. A person at a horse-race may at first have so small a degree of pleasurable hope and painful fear aroused that the intensity does not force itself into consciousness. The increasingly rapid pendulum-swing of consciousness from hope to fear and back again becomes soon so intense that this objective intensity of feeling forces its way into conscious life as feeling of intensity. This excitement may be mainly regarded as accompaniment, or it may be valued in itself as excitement for excitement’s sake. This absorption in the feeling of intensity is eagerly sought for by the ennuyé. The devoted theatre-goer often induces both pleasures and pains simply for this resultant feeling of tension which he regards as enjoyable for its own sake. Feeling-excitement in the simpler and earlier form and in this later artificial form is plainly pleasure or pain coloured by slight element of cognition as recognition of intensity, and by volition in continuing or in stopping the causative activity.

Bearing in mind the analysis of excitement just made, the true interpretation of several matters which have been suggested is obvious and clear. Mr. Johnson (Mind, xiii. 82) remarks that very intense mental pleasure and pain tends to run into a state of neutral excitement. This I interpret as the mental law that intensity of any mental activity, of any pleasure or pain, tends to displace this activity by feeling of intensity. This feeling of intensity is indeed neutral as regards previous states—that is, it is not, of course, the feeling whose intensity it feels; but, as I have sought to show, it is nevertheless always pleasure or pain. Again, as to the question whether states of mind equally pleasurable or painful may have different degrees of excitement. If excitement means here subjective excitement, then I answer that they do not have any degree of excitement, for feeling of intensity can never be a quality of the feeling whose intensity is felt. If excitement is the objective form, and refers to the intensity in general, then, as has been before said, it is a confusion in terms to apply the terms pleasure and pain to it. The anticipation suggested by Mr. Johnson as a case of neutral excitement is precisely analogous to the case of excitement at a horse-race, which has been analysed. Mr. Johnson concludes that feeling is not only more or less pleasure or pain, but also more or less excitement. The proper way of stating this is: all feelings, including the feeling of excitement, consist of pleasure or pain and have degrees of intensity.

Again, let me note the relation of intensity, and consequently feeling of intensity, to quantity of consciousness—a subject suggested by Mr. Sully (Mind, xiii. 252). The fundamental properties of consciousness—quality, quantity, intensity—and also their inter-relations, would be a fruitful theme for extended discussion. I think that the clearing-up of many problems would result from thorough investigation and careful definition in these points; but at present I can only offer a remark or two upon the subject. It is plain that intensity varies with different qualities, that certain kinds of mental action are more generally characterised by high degrees of intensity than others. Presentations tend to higher intensities than representations, and pains than pleasures. It is noticeable that our psychological nomenclature, both popular and scientific, is mostly concerned with qualities, which shows that quantities and intensities have not received the attention they deserve, and have not been carefully discriminated. A representation of the same house comes up in the minds of two persons, one of whom has lived in it, the other merely seen it several times. Each psychosis is as representative as the other: they have the same quality, but in quantity and intensity they vary greatly. In a single multiplex act of consciousness, the former embraces a wide reach of detail and association and a high degree of intensity which is lacking in the meagre and faint image of the latter. Physiologically, quantity is as the mass of co-ordinate coincident activities of brain in highest centres, and intensity is as the arterial and nervous tension in the highest centres. Intensities may be equal, and quantities very unequal; as compare one greatly interested in a game of cards with a person watching a near relative at a critical moment of illness. Intensity of pleasurable hope alternating with painful fear may be equal in both cases, but in quantity the latter would tend to exceed. Very quiet natures are often characterised by largeness of quantity of consciousness. Other things being equal, intensity tends to reduce quantity and obscure quality of consciousness. Quantity, like intensity, may cause a reflex act of consciousness when it becomes so great as to push into consciousness as recognition and feeling of quantity; and as a feeling of largeness, elevation and mental power it is clearly distinguishable from excitement as feeling of intensity. Intensity is dependent on the force or strength by which a mental state tends to persist against other states which may be crowding in, and it is also closely connected with rapidity of mental movement; but it is primarily tension, consciousness at its highest stretch, specially as touching upon interest, an element more or less involved in all consciousness.

It would seem highly desirable, in order to keep clear the distinction between intensity and feeling-of-intensity, to restrict the term Excitement to the latter meaning, and substitute the general term Intensity for all objective excitement so-called. It is also greatly to be desired that the reflex states which arise from sudden or great changes in quality, quantity and intensity of consciousness, and which are commonly termed feelings, should receive more general attention from psychologists than heretofore. I have in this paper essayed something in this direction, but it is a very large field, and comparatively unexplored.

However, so far as the problem of feeling as indifference is concerned, enough has been said on Excitement and Intensity, and I shall now consider Neutralisation as giving neutral feeling, a method suggested by Mr. Johnson (Mind, xiii. 82), and developed by Miss Mason (xiii. 253). Does a feeling, neutral as regards pleasure and pain, result from the union in one consciousness of a pleasure and pain of equal intensities? Is there a composition of equal pleasure-pain forces so that resultant equals zero? Such a question implies a clear apprehension of what is meant by being in consciousness, and as to the possibility of perfect coincidence and equality in mental activities. It is plain that so far as consciousness is linear, neutralisation cannot occur. Where there is but one track, and but one train at a time, collision is impossible. Mental states often appear coexistent while they are really consecutive. It is doubtful whether pain from toothache and pleasure from music ever appear in absolute synchronism in consciousness, but they may alternate so rapidly sometimes as to appear synchronous to uncritical analysis. To a man drowning, a lifetime of conscious experience seems condensed into a few seconds. This means a consciousness made very sensitive and very rapid in its movement, and which acts like a camera taking pictures with a lightning-shutter. Even if a pleasure and pain did coincide, it is probable that in no case would they be exactly equal. In mental life as in organic life every product has an individuality: as every leaf differs from every other leaf, so every mental state is on completest observation sui generis. This is evidently a most delicate investigation, but I doubt whether it can ever be shown that two equal pleasures and pains ever appear in the same sense in consciousness at the same time. Practically equal pleasures and pains in consecutive consciousness lead to vacillation, and the secondary pain of alternation and excitement drives intelligent agents to new activity, or in stupid agents the alternation may be carried to exhaustion.

It is undoubtedly true that consciousness, in all the higher forms at least, is a complex; yet full and complete consciousness is probably of one element only, and the remaining portion of the nexus grades off into subconsciousness and unconsciousness. There is a network of coexistent states of consciousness in different degrees in mutual reaction, each striving for dominance but only one at a time reaching it. Some portions of the nexus, as Ego-tone, are quite permanent elements. The light of a large and brilliant consciousness may illumine a considerable area, but brightness most certainly diminishes in rapid ratio as the distance increases from attention, the single point of greatest illumination. A highly developed brain may sustain a highly complex consciousness, but it is only at the point of highest functional activity that we find the physiological basis of a full consciousness. While high grades of mental life are so complex, we do not find anywhere a mental compound. Two diverse or opposite elements never combine into a compound which is totally unlike either. Close analysis will fail to reveal any process of neutralisation or combination whereby we experience neutral states of feeling.

I have endeavoured to set forth the real nature of certain so-called neutral feelings; but at the bottom the question is, as was at first intimated, a matter of definition. Is it best to restrict the term Feeling to pleasurable and painful states of consciousness, or is it advisable for clearness and definiteness to widen the use of the term so as to include certain neutral states? From such analysis as has been made, I doubt the advisability. Appeal in such matters must always be made to analysis, and the advantage must be shown for a concrete example. The a priori idea or general impression that pleasure and pain is too small a basis for all feeling has no real weight. Moreover, it must always be borne in mind that psychology, like all other sciences, deals only with phenomena and not with essences, not with mind but with mental manifestations, not with feeling as mental entity having properties, being pleasurable, painful, etc., but with these qualities in and for themselves. Thus the metaphysical fallacy hidden in such common expressions as “pleasurable and painful feelings” is to be constantly guarded against. The feeling is not pleasurable or painful, but is the pleasure or the pain. The feeling has no independent being apart from the attributes which in common usage are attached to it, nor is there any general act of consciousness with which these properties are to be connected. As indicated at the beginning of this paper, this common tendency has its psychological basis in the bringing under the term Feeling some of the more permanent elements of consciousness—especially the Ego-sense—which stand for metaphysics as beings and entities having properties. Knowledge, Feeling, Will, are for nominalistic science simply general terms denoting the three groups of mental phenomena which seem to stand off most clearly and fundamentally from each other, and Pleasure and Pain are most clearly and fundamentally set over against Knowing and Willing. It does not seem that Professor Bain and others have made plain to us any better differentia.

If this definition of Feeling seems the best that descriptive classification can give us, it is certainly enforced by genetic considerations. The key to a really scientific classification lies in the history of mind in the individual and race. The greatest progress in psychology is not to be attained by the psychologist continually reverting to his own highly developed consciousness, but, as in all sciences, the study of the simple must be made to throw light upon the complex. Mentality like life is a body of phenomena whose forms cannot be separated by hard and fast lines into orders, genera, species; but there is a continuous development of radical factors. In the earliest forms of mind we find the most radical distinctions most clearly and simply set forth, and what Feeling is at first, it is by continuity of development the same for ever after. The earliest indications of conscious life show merest trace of apprehension of object, some organic pleasure and pain, considerable striving and effort. Mental evolution, like all evolution, is not by the elimination but by the expansion of its primal factors; and by the continuous amplification and intensification of these the highest development is reached. Pleasure and pain remain then for all consciousness as constant factors; and if the term Feeling is to indicate one element in tripartite mind, it must be held to this meaning of pleasure and pain. Pleasure and pain in their most complicated colourings from developed knowledge and will, and in their most subtle interactions, remain true to the primal type; and when we find a state of consciousness in which neither is a dominant factor, we had best denote it by some other term than Feeling. This evolutionary reason seems to me the strongest one for making the term Feeling signify states of pleasure or pain, and, as I have suggested (Mind, xi. 74-5), a genetic classification of the feelings must proceed upon this basis.

CHAPTER V
EARLY DIFFERENTIATION

A blind psychic life of pure feeling cannot long avail in the sharp struggle of existence, for to all stimulations it secures only two crude reactions, a spasmodic, defensive activity from pain, and an appropriative motion from pleasure. This perfectly subjective consciousness can serve only the earliest and crudest demands of life; but as the struggle for existence becomes fiercer, the more delicate and definite reactions, which can only come through cognition, are required. All that we can say as to the origin of knowledge in general is that it arose, or rather was achieved, like other conscious and extra-conscious functions, in answer to the pressing demands of the organism; and so far as we can see, it does not seem to be evolved from any pre-existing consciousness or any common basis of mind. It is a distinct type of consciousness, and so utterly diverse that we cannot trace any psychical continuity. However, we can remark this,—that perfect objectifying is not at once achieved, but cognition must be regarded as beginning in a very minute and obscure germ in some intense feeling state. Yet this germ does not seem to have a direct psychical connection with the pure feeling by which it is excited into existence, but it is a reaction to an opposite mode more diverse from pleasure and pain than these are from each other. Moreover, according to the law of evolution by struggle, this first cognition does not come to mind, but is achieved only in most intense will act, comparable for relative intensity to the knowledge originated by severest effort of a man in danger of his life listening to a barely audible sound, or watching a barely visible object on a distant horizon. The evolution point for all life is in stress and strain, and this is the law of the development of sensation at all times in psychic history.[^[A]]

[A]. Cf. my remarks in Psychological Review, vol. ii. pp. 53 ff.

Cognition undoubtedly began as a very crude sensation, as the barest movement towards objectifying sense, as a pure sensation without any image form, any direct perception of an object. In the order of disappearance of elements from consciousness, we note that sensation maintains itself through a long series, and is the last stage before pure feeling sets in. As heat stimulus is increased, sense of heat begins at a certain point, and increases up to a certain intensity of the stimulus and to a certain intensity of its own, when it rapidly vanishes, and in the agony on the verge of unconsciousness is lost in pure pain. We note also that the cognition of object, of thing, disappears before the sensation of heat does. A person burning to death is for a time conscious of the fire, which consciousness at length is lost in intense painful sensations of heat; and this in turn, at the acme of consciousness entirely disappears, leaving only pure pain. Further, the rise to full consciousness, as well as the fall to unconsciousness, also suggests bare sensation as the original cognition. If a hot iron be applied to one in deep sleep, the order of waking consciousness—apart from any dream order—is pure pain, then sensation of heat, then awareness of hot object, and also of part heated and paining. In our ordinary consciousness it is certainly very hard to even partially isolate the various elements. Sometimes, however, a person will say, “I have such a queer pain; I do not know what it is.” The psychosis thus indicated is evidently pain with a movement towards a sensation which yet is not realized. Sensation does not come though it is looked for; there is pain only, and unqualified save by the peculiarity of being unidentified. The sense of lack of sensation bewilders, because sensation is so constant for our psychic life; but in primitive mind there is no such feeling of queerness when sensation does not come, or it is not able to attain it. This inwrought tendency to sense all our pains and pleasures, and to feel the lack if we do not, is evidently the result of a long evolution. Sensation is thus seen to be an activity which we exercise to give definition to our pure feelings; there is something unfulfilled for us if sensation does not come, and we may thus go out for it and interpret the pain in sense form by a will-effort. Primitive mind, however, does not achieve its sensations as incited by this indefinite sense of lack-queerness or strangeness, but through pain at some critical moment to obtain a suitable reaction. All sensation is at first, as we even now can faintly realize, by a severe effort, and is not a spontaneous, incoming impression. Paradoxical as is the expression, “we learn to know,” yet it contains a truth in that cognition is an attainment incited by the necessities of the organism. Necessity is the mother of invention, and knowledge is at first an invention which the organism hits upon to help it in the exigencies of experience. In early and even in later consciousness it is probable that the majority of pleasures and pains are so dull in intensity that they do not rouse sensation, and comparatively few incite as far as to perception. A close analysis of our own consciousness even will show many pleasures and pains, many vague states of uneasiness and discomfort, and many of organic pleasure and comfort, which lead to nothing and come to nothing for either sensation or perception. These states stand alone by themselves, and vanish with little effect on either mind or body. They constitute the outer fringe of consciousness where all mentality starts, and under sufficient pressure of life-interest develops into great fulness and complexity, or, when of comparatively little value to the organism, they disappear suddenly and completely. I am inclined also to think that close scrutiny will sometimes reveal for psychical life, as for the physical, certain entirely useless survivals, undifferentiated feelings of some types, and probably also some pure sensations.

I conceive then that the fundamental order of consciousness is not, as usually set forth, pure sensation with accompanying pleasure and pain, but the reverse—pure pleasure and pain with accompanying sensation; and only by a very gradual evolution indeed did pure feeling bring in sensation, which is thus always sequent and not accompaniment. We commonly inquire as to a sensation, Was it pleasurable or painful? but the true form of inquiry is, Was the pain or pleasure senseful? Did it attain to bringing in the qualifying element of a sensation, and in what form?

The qualifying of pure feeling to attain actions suitably differentiated for distinct forces must have proceeded very slowly, and have had the dimmest beginning. We cannot suppose that consciousness attained at once and easily to a manifold of sense, much less have had this brought to it, involuntarily received. The earliest forms of sensations were no doubt of those affections of the body produced by heat, pressure, and other elements which determine most vitally the existence of the organism. The first sensation indeed was undoubtedly not in any particular mode, but was a bare and undifferentiated form. It was some such indefinite and general sensation as we may sometimes detect near the vanishing-point of consciousness just before pure pain state occurs. For example, the sense of heat as such is lost at a given temperature for a given case, and there exists for a moment a vague general sensation, sensation per se, before mere pain absorbs all consciousness. Sensation at its very origin was not sense of any kind, sense of heat, pressure, etc., but a mere undifferentiated sense of bodily affection. The body is not, of course, apprehended as object, but there is a vague attributing and qualifying which marks the state as more than purely central, as being a real objectifying. Toothache, for instance, implies ache before the toothache, and this general aching is the type of early unorganized sensation. Pain is the essence of the state, and is throughout dominant, the cognition in mere aching being a very minor element. “I was awakened in the night by a toothache,” is the objective description of a triple movement in consciousness, pain, ache, toothache. The earliest cognitive experiences were all of this very general type of sensation, which becomes gradually more definitely localized and qualified as distinct modes of sensation; pain-hunger, pain-heat, pain-pressure, and corresponding pleasure-sensations are differentiated. Subtract the mere pain from hunger state and from painful sensation of heat, and we have certain quales which are difficult to analyse, but which are cognitive in nature. Diverse bodily affections are sensed diversely instead of being felt in one mode, pure feeling.

We have far outgrown the sensation-cognition psychic stage, and speaking of psychic history in biologic terms, it belongs to the early palæozoic. We have yet to formulate the succession of psychic ages, in each of which some distinct psychic power attains dominancy, and produces minds as diverse from ours as the organisms of past ages are different from our own bodies. As already pointed out, it is an extremely difficult problem to realize by subjective method these ancient types. A mere general sensation is a very rare phenomenon in our ordinary consciousness, and even special sensations rarely occur in pure form. To realize what sensation of heat is for a simple consciousness, we must strip our minds bare of most of their furnishings, for all our sensations of heat are interpreted with reference to visual and tactual objects which must be non-existent for early consciousness. Sensation for us is a complex of sensations plus perceptions and other cognitive and emotional elements which lie beyond early mind, but which by an inevitable automorphism we interpret into early forms. This automorphism with the child is complete, and is never perfectly effaced even in the most accomplished psychologist. A life of simple feeling, or of this plus simple sensation is most difficult of realization; still we may have reason to believe that the psychic life of a low type consists wholly in repeated pains and pleasures occasionally rising so high that consciousness reaches to a vague general sensation, or rarely to a thrill of heat, or sense of hunger or pressure. Of course, in all cases we assume will-activity.

And we have to emphasize this again, that all sensation, like all pain, while always from objects is never of objects. The objective description here, as usual, does not give the inner state. Our automorphic tendency leads us inevitably to regard the order in which we perceive the organism to be effected by external objects to be its received order. But a little reflection always convinces us that this is in the nature of the case an erroneous procedure, that what happens within consciousness is not primarily any cognition of a world of objects, nor an apprehension of them in any form. Sensation, while objective by virtue of being cognition, is not in any way a realization of object, but is objective only toward the dynamic within the individual organism, and is not apprehension of static wholes of any kind. It is an objectifying to force, not to things, and this in the modes of physiological affection. It is not appreciation of a something, but of a somehow.

In the earliest stage of mind, as has been before noticed, all manner of material causes rouse nought more than a pure feeling mode; heat, pressure, electricity, sound, light, nutriment or its absence, if they attain to waken the function of consciousness, accomplish no more than pure feeling as bare pain and pleasure. It is, of course, natural to conceive that from the first consciousness, responds objectively in sensation in as many modes as organism is moved by external and internal forces; but a multiform sense origin of consciousness is not borne out by the general tendency and law of evolution, nor yet by such special indications in consciousness as we are able to observe. When a very young infant seems to reach pleasurably to warmth, if we are correct in positing consciousness at all, it is still very unlikely that there is sense of warmth, but the state is probably pure pleasure; and if there is sense of warmth, it did not give the pleasure, but the reverse. We believe likewise that it is probable that a consciousness response to nutriment is, at first, mere pleasure, and only, secondarily, organic sensation. Thus, warmth and nutriment effect, but only, at first, in the one mode of pure feeling, and secondly, pure sensation as general organic satisfaction. Lastly arises a differencing in consciousness for the different bodily changes. And the multiformity of stimulus and paucity of consciousness in modes while so very apparent in early mind is yet always found in all grades of psychic life. The responsiveness of consciousness is never perfected, and mind has a practically infinite field for the acquirement of sensation, for appreciating what has never affected consciousness, or which mind has felt or known only by some general mode. The infant, no doubt, has many pains for which it has no sensation values. These pains, perfectly pure and undifferentiated the one from the other, have had their occasion in a variety of physical changes. A native of the tropics, who on first touching ice says it burns, has at first but a single sensation for very diverse physical affections; but he soon attains an icy sensation, that ice feels not burning, but stinging cold. Men, civilized and educated, often are consciously affected by bodily changes of which they are wholly incognizant, the psychosis being not specialized according to the mode of change. In degraded states of consciousness, which come to all, there often appears obscure feeling and sensation, which is a practically single mode of answer to a very wide variety of physical excitation. In realizing the variety of external objects and changes the mind proceeds but slowly, each new form always at first in pure feeling. It is only as something affects feeling and interest that we ever come to know it or its manifestations in physiological change.

Sensations are, then, by no means such original and simple elements of mind as often conceived; but they are developed forms of some general undifferentiated cognitive state, sensation as bare apprehension of bodily disturbance, and this itself cannot be accounted absolutely original. The evolution into particular modes of sensation, as sense of heat, hunger, light, pressure, etc., is in the struggle for existence gradually achieved, and also therewith the evolution of special sense-organs. And we must always bear in mind that it is not the sense-organ that develops the sensation, but on the contrary the effort at sensing that produces, maintains, and improves the sense-organ. The eagle’s eye has been developed by unceasing straining as incited by the necessities of existence felt in pain and pleasure. It is natural for us at our stage of development to suppose that the organs of sense give sensations and to explain the sensation by the physiological organ; but when we reflect that sensations come to us from the organ only up to the measure of the momentum from heredity, we see the insufficiency of purely physiological interpretation. Evolution to-day is on the same basis as evolution at any period, and as it always has been, it always will be, dependent upon a ceaseless nisus. It is only by painstaking effort—labour—that man progresses in sensibility, and this effort has always an incentive in some form of interest that is pleasure-pain basis. Thus it is that the astronomer’s eye, the microscopist’s eye, the artist’s eye, is formed. The multiform sensibility of the tea-taster is attained by assiduous tasting, and the development in organ only follows pari passu. What is seemingly simple and original in sensation for us was, no doubt, like the very special forms of sensibility acquired by our specialist, achieved by the lower forms painfully and toilfully, and passed on to us. Our highest feats of sensation and insight may likewise for our remote descendants be intuitions, whose apparently simple nature may be asserted as the basis of philosophic systems. A genius is one who antedates the general stage of progress of his period by having as intuitions, as seemingly direct and simple knowledges and sensations, what is beyond or barely within the intensest effort of his contemporaries, though it may become common and easy for all men of later ages.

The moving factors, the active agents in the evolution of consciousness, are not, I think, sense-impressions of any kind; these are the results, rather than the incentives, of mental evolutions. Mind acquires its whole sense outfit, and receives no cognition whatever ready-made. It is hard, indeed, for us to put ourselves at the point of view of acquirement of what seem to us simple impressions of sense; but the difficulty is only of the same general nature as to understand how what seem to be direct perceptions of things in space are really indirect. The progress of psychology will, in my opinion, tend to show more and more that givens of all kinds are such in appearance only, and that mind in its essence is purely a feeling-effort.

The differentiation of action secured through sensation and its differentiations is evidently of the utmost importance to life, but still the objectivity secured is small. In the pure feeling stage, reaction is a very hit-and-miss affair, and in pure sensation stage it is but little better. Guided only by present sensations, the organism in the struggle for existence is blind to all objects, and, knowing not itself nor other objects, anticipatory action is entirely beyond its power. The growth of mind is to secure delicacy and precision of adjustment with largest time and space extension, and the achievement of objectification was a tour de force of the highest value. The exigencies of life-struggle lead comparatively early from cognition of mode of affection to the cognition of thing affecting. Perception arises to supplement sensation, and full objectification opens the way for intelligent activities. Thing or object is first, no doubt, apprehended tactually; but the sense of touch is, of course, acquired before cognition of thing touched. We, indeed, find it difficult to appreciate this, since in touch we constantly apprehend things as in contact with us; still, if in some very sluggish state, as deep sleep, when the varied and correlated life of sensation with perception is practically nil, a rough object be made to bear upon the body as a lump in the mattress, it is evident that consciousness begins as bare pain, then general uneasiness as bare general sensation, then sense of touch, and finally cognition of object by means of and through the touch sensation. The sense of thing touched follows on sense of touch. This general order may be illustrated from a squib in a comic paper of the day. A swell finding a friend sitting by an open window on a cold day asks him if he does not feel cold. He answers, “Ya-as; I guess I do. I knew theah was something the mattah with me; I suppose it must be cold.” The threefold movement in this noodle’s mind as evidenced by his words, is, first, feeling pain; second, a something the matter, i.e., general sensing and objectifying thereupon; third, particularizing to feeling cold. He has simply gone back to primitive process. Touch or other sensation is in itself no more than an objectification of physiological change, and calls up no object whatever. In pure sensation there is no image of anything, but it is merely a peculiar modifying of pleasure-pain according to mode of physiological stimulus. A heat thrill does not include objectification to any existences, not even to the physical body of the organism sensing.

It is only by and through sense of physiological disturbance that awareness of object is achieved. Intense sensation stimulates to full cognition, to complete act of objectifying. This tendency of sensation is illustrated by the common saying, “hunger sharpens wit”; and certain it is that presentation of food objects is arrived at only by this stimulus. The earliest objectifying, no doubt, arose from a pain-sensation of some kind; but this primitive cognition of object was purely general, just as primitive sensation was purely general. A world of objects is not at first and at once attained, but only object barely as such, dim awareness of a mere mass. In the earliest stage every presentation is of a bare objectivity, so that one cognition differs from another in no wise as regards content. This mere thing, which is first full cognition content, is next to no-thing. When we try to conceive this thing we inevitably foist in some special sensation and perception, most generally sense of light and seeing; and the explication just made in the previous sentence was undoubtedly understood by the reader in visual terms. Our apprehension of object is correlation of several modes, and it is most difficult to intimate in any wording what bare undifferentiated apprehension of object may be. If the embryology of mind were more thoroughly studied, we should understand in some measure, for this stage most probably occurs in the very earliest activities of every human and animal mind. A totum objectivum, which is thing and nothing more, is, perhaps, occasionally observable in our own consciousness when at very low ebb—at such times when pure feeling and pure sensation become possible phases.

This general, undifferentiated cognition of object and all the special forms therefrom developed must always be accounted as coming about in no spontaneous way, but as attained and supported through will activity of an intense form. Perception of object is not in any true sense impressed from without, nor yet in any true sense is it a native faculty or power. It is not more or less freely constructed out of more or less given data. It is the necessities of life that bring mind to achieve full cognition; and this alone is the first cause of cognition, which is always in its inception cognitive effort toward objective realities, towards a world of things. These objects, among which and in close relation to which some single object, organism, must live—this is the common postulate of all biologic science, psychology included—constitute a world. The living object is such by virtue of the simplest consciousness, a feeling-will, as absolutely essential to any advantageous action. It is by this root-form, feeling-will, that cognition is ultimately accomplished, and not by virtue of any imprinting of objects upon mind as in some measure a tabula rasa, nor yet in any purely subjective construction of object. Object is revealed neither from without nor from within; it is achieved solely as a guide to advantageous action in the struggle for existence. Of course, the mind does not knowingly reach knowledge, does not foreknow it and its advantage in order to attain it; this is a contradiction in terms, and profects backward a highly refined teleology. All we do at present is to simply assume it as law that serviceable consciousnesses, cognition and others, are inevitably attained in the stress of existence. For the science of psychology, metaphysics apart, this is the best standpoint, and all we can now say. The confirmation of an organism’s activity, cognitive and otherwise, as serviceable, is in feeling pain and pleasure, which is the original mode in which objects excite consciousness or consciousness reacts to them. It is in feeling as the starting point that cognition is determined and maintained. We cannot scientifically speak of any mental process as native, that is, mind itself is not native. By the very term original we exclude inborn. The first consciousness occurred, it was merely event, useful event; and if we further say it was acquired, we probably say what agrees best with biology as a whole. It is impossible at present to discuss whether or not mind may be a primitive vital function, for where life begins or ends is itself a most obscure problem; but whether it be primary or secondary, mind in no form is properly native, that is a pure given, but we simply say the function is displayed, as we speak of nutrition or reproduction. In the organism we see something which has nutritive, reproductive, motor processes, perhaps also consciousness processes; and so far as there is any problem as to the nature of consciousness as native function it belongs to a general biologic problem. As to the question as to whether cognition or what cognitions are original and simple in all mind, we have already excluded the whole field of cognition from this position.

Does the general objectification, the first stage in cognition of object, have any special function for the developed presentation forms of later consciousness? Mr. Ward, in his suggestive article in the Encyclopædia Britannica, seems to intimate that it has. He says (p. 50), "Actual presentation consists in this continuum being differentiated and every differentiation constitutes a new presentation.“ Mr. Ward in this connection sets forth that presentation-continuity in consciousness is determined by a presentation-continuum which is ”totum objectivum." Presentation activity is fundamentally a differentiating of this constant element. We might compare this continuum to an ocean from whose surface rise waves, particular presentations, which subside again into the parent sea, which ever remains as the constant basis of all wave movements.

Now the question of continua is a very broad one. Do the early stages of consciousness, pure feeling, pure sensation, pure objectivity, remain as constituting the basic bulk of all higher consciousness, and is all higher consciousness but differentiation of these as well as from these, that is, is it no more than differentiating activity kept up on a vast series of levels and sub-levels? Or are we to regard them as regressive stages to which developed consciousness rarely returns? May we consider that there is a certain histology of mind, that certain primitive forms, like tissues in the body, constitute the inner and constant structure of mind?

The theory of continua, be it observed, in its fulness requires a numberless series of levels and sub-levels supporting one another, for a high form of consciousness pre-supposes an indefinite series of antecedent stages. While any highly differentiated consciousness is going on it must be an actual differentiating of the preceding stage, which is therefore coincident and pre-existent to it, and this latter in turn must have its supporting continuum, and so on down ad infinitum. The theory makes mind a wheel within wheel of bewildering intricacy. Yet mind in this point of view has a certain analogy with the physiological status of the higher organisms, for example, the human body is colonial, is constituted of a multitude of cells, a simple type of organisms, by whose consentaneous activity the whole body is animate.

One objection to this theory is that it confounds functioning with differentiating. Not every act of consciousness is by its very nature a differentiating, a movement toward specialization. Consciousness is on the whole more often regressive than progressive, and very often practically neither, as for example, in all instinctive, habitual, and spontaneous activities.

But again, while differentiating act certainly pre-supposes the undifferentiated, does it require coincidence? For instance, vision as ordinary form, receiving impressions, certainly contains no totum objectivum activity, but also as differentiating act, as intense visual effort reaching to higher development, it generally, at least, seems free from any lower stage, and is engrossed in itself. Since we make the prime cause of all mental development and differentiation in will, we do not need any undifferentiated general ground remaining in consciousness as basic element, nor does analysis of consciousness show this constant element. Successive phases of presentation development are attained through effort, but one does not gradually grow and branch out of the other by a purely inward impetus of its own. I believe, indeed, that the inner life of mind consists in its original forms, and that they remain in late mind not merely as useless survivals but having a distinct functional value; but I do not see how any or all of the general stages of mentality constitute continua for consciousness of higher types. Instead of being constant basal elements they occur and are blotted out with such rapidity that reflection can very rarely identify them (vide p. 63). They are lost and swallowed up in complex consciousness so quickly as to leave no trace upon memory, and they do not subsist or continue throughout the complex forms. They are then the very opposite of continua, being, in fact, the most evanescent of mental phenomena. Consciousness in all higher forms, as the human mind, must and does mount the main steps of its very early growth with marvellous rapidity and leaves them entirely behind. The more primitive the stage the more quickly it vanishes, till often it seems to appear in tendency form only, or be thrown into a subconsciousness. Primitive types exercise a most important but fleeting influence in advanced consciousness which rises through them most rapidly and easily, but in the less advanced the contrary is the case. The Australian savages, as observed by Lumholtz, came to their senses and reached a full awakening in the morning very slowly as compared with civilized men. With dull children likewise we observe how slowly they awaken. All regressive forms reach but slowly to their full consciousness and dwell long in intermediate stages. But in all cases when higher forms enter the lower disappears, when varied perception enters in awakening, then the preceding dim general objectivity is wholly obliterated.

It will be remarked that admitting, as we do, the constant existence in mental life of feeling as pleasure and pain, we thereby make this a real continuum. But we may say that consciousness is never without a pleasure-pain constituent and yet not assert a continuum. Consciousness continually possesses some pleasure-pain element, but this is not a feeling as continuous state, as an underlying differentiating basis pleasures and pains as diverse independent states are essential incentives in all consciousness, but they do not constitute a single continuum.

Of course, every consciousness, as long as it continues, is in this very general sense a continuum, but no form of consciousness, primitive or advanced, can, with one exception, be called a continuum, as a single mode running through and unifying a long stretch of varied consciousnesses. This exception is the complex element of ego-tone. Early mind is no more than a kaleidoscopic jumble, with no one organizing and unifying element. Even when consciousness from happening in purely disconnected flashes attains first a certain limited continuity, this is not by means of some conscious element persisting through a series, but merely signifies that as fast as one consciousness dies out, another takes its place, i.e., the continuity is purely formal and temporal. It is through self-consciousness alone that any real continuum is achieved in and for consciousness, and this ego-tone is far from being primitive.

The sensation and objectifying as discussed in this chapter in connection with feeling, both pain and pleasure, constitutes complex states of consciousness which may be termed a feeling when the pain or pleasure is dominant, or a cognition when the sensing and objectifying is dominant. Thus by a feeling I understand a state of consciousness which is either entirely or dominantly pain or pleasure, the former being pure feeling, the latter mixed feeling. This latter class constitutes the feelings properly so-called, as varied pains and pleasures, the variation element being the cognition in some form. Feeling as being in different kinds is made such by the differentiation of cognition. Thus hunger is neither a pure sensation—that is by pure sensation meaning not absolutely pure, for pleasure or pain is invariable incentive concomitant, but sensation pure from any distinct mode of apprehension, as merely general and undifferentiated—nor yet is hunger pure pain, but it is the combination of a certain definite sensing, beyond the pure stage, with pain. Hunger is a feeling when the pain aspect is dominant, is cognition when sensation aspect is dominant. The confusion in the use of the terms sensation and feeling comes from the difficulty in determining dominancy in given cases. Certainly the exact line where feeling of hunger passes into sensation of hunger can be settled only by the most careful discrimination, but at any great remove from this line the character of the state is very manifest. By no effort can we separate the sensing from the pain so as to have nothing but sensation, though the attributing to bodily affection does in the incipient stages of hunger become dominant, but as hunger increases, pain becomes dominant, and ultimately the end as the beginning is pure pain. We say, “I feel hungry,” for all stages when any sensing is present, and this indiscriminate popular use of the word “feel,” has tended to obscure the real nature of the whole mentality. The same line of remark applies to feeling thirsty, feeling hot, etc.

CHAPTER VI
REPRESENTATION AND EMOTION

“I feel cold,” and “I feel afraid of cold,” are expressions which denote two tolerably distinct feelings. The main characteristic which distinguishes the second feeling as an emotion is obviously representation. In the first case, I have pain with presentation of the cold, in the second, pain with the mere representation of the cold. If I feel cold, I have direct and immediate experience; if I fear the cold, I have an experience in view of experience, pain at pain. When one says, “I have a violent pain in my head,” and a friend answers, “I am deeply pained to hear it,” we recognise at once the fundamental distinction between sensation and emotion. We have in this chapter to discuss some points as to the rise and nature of emotion in its relation to representation.

The theory which we have been elaborating is that pure pleasure and pain are the original and causative elements in the whole realm of mind. Pure feeling is the most direct and necessary, and so the first response in conscious form, to all stimuli, and it is the incitement to all cognitive activity in its inception and growth. The harm and good to organism, are at once, and most quickly realized in terms of pure feeling, and the painful necessities in the struggle for existence, lead to a continuous development from this point. Dominant pleasure and pain, with the different presentation forms, constitute different feelings, as of warmth, hunger, cold, etc., to which some fuller objectification may be added. Adjustment is thereby made manifold, but only with present stimulus. There is no appreciation of the experienceable. All that is attained is immediate present apprehension which in no wise suggests or interprets, but which is strictly self-contained.

We must, indeed, acknowledge that no consciousness, save, of course, the very first, can exist in perfect isolation totally unaffected by any other. The second conscious activity was not a perfect facsimile of the first, and its variation is due at least in the main to the precedent mentality. What is, is determined by what has been, and this universal law is in mind the inductive nature of all experience. The solidarity of all mentality and of all materiality is a scientific postulate, a principle which we must assume, or deny all scientific investigation. The movement of a molecule in the sun, millions of years since, influences the condition of my body to-day, and the flush of pain in some protozoan millions of years since, has had an infinitesimal share in determining my present state of mind. Yet this fact that every psychosis is what it is by reason of the whole line of previous psychoses, does not lead us to suppose that experience cognizes itself from the beginning, and consciously builds itself up. There is for a long time no consciousness of process of mental integration. The whole universe of mind is the necessary prius of each individual manifestation, yet the particular phenomenon in consciousness does not include a sense of, or reaching out to, these conditioning agencies. No sense of dependence is generated. But we ask, How can one conscious state unconsciously effect or determine another? How can consciousness be affected without consciousness of affection? Yet, difficult as it may appear to set clearly before us the nature of this relation of a consciousness to all the preconsciousness, it is still obvious that the intricate nexus of cause and effect in mind does not need to be known of mind or realized in the individual consciousness, and is not, and cannot be. Every consciousness is the derivative resultant of innumerable pre-consciousnesses, and it goes to the determining and qualifying of innumerable post-consciousnesses, yet it is neither consciousness of the future or the past, though it involves both.

The early phase of mind where consciousnesses are wholly un-unified from within by any central or continuous consciousness, and whose solidarity is wholly in an unconscious integration is so foreign to us who have minds where experience of experience is continually in process, that it is with the utmost difficulty we can in any wise conceive it. It is evident that a very low organism may have consciousnesses, but no mind, that is, no self-unifying whole of consciousnesses. It does not possess a mind, but during its whole life it attains psychoses which are merely disjecta reached to help an immediate necessity of existence, and then fading completely away. Each psychosis is achieved more easily than the former by reason of the former, though there is no consciousness of connection with it. The increment and qualifying of a given experience by past experience is not reached by it. Some differentiation is attained under pressure of struggle for existence, and experience is constituted, but is wholly unknowing of itself and in no wise self-formative.

We have now, however, to consider the problem, how experience came to itself, and how and why representation and emotion should arise in the struggle of existence.

At the first, as we have seen, organisms responded in conscious form only in pleasure and pain, and this only when the actual damage or benefit to the individual was very considerable. When the hurt was critical, then only was pain accomplished as a function to secure self-preservative action, but gradually through survival of the fittest the greater susceptibility was attained, so that minor lesions are felt in pain terms, and some general sensing and objectifying lead to some differentiation in adjustment. The external parts of the body become specially sensitive, and ciliate extensions are formed. Injury to these results in pain and consequent reactions, and in this wise by injury to a small part great harm to the organism as a whole is prevented. The low forms of life are thus enabled to avoid the hurtful before they meet it in full annihilatory force. These practically anticipatory reactions—though there is no real anticipation in consciousness, no real experience of experience—I term the method of incipiency. Pain reactions are thus reached with less and less actual harm until the very slightest injury to a minute tentacle will suffice to awaken pain.

This tentacular experience, however, is obviously very limited, and has incidental disadvantages. Further, that pain should be attained when there is little actual harm, is good, but to attain pain, and self-conservative action before any injury is done, but only about to be done is better. Reaction to potential harm is a most important advantageous step. In the earlier form of mentality, the animal must actually be in the process of being devoured by an enemy before a pain reaction is achieved, but in the later representative form of reaction there is complete anticipation, and the animal can come off with an absolutely whole skin. Ideal pains, as fear, anger, and other emotions, are gradually substituted for pains which are real in the sense that they arise in a positive hurt to the life of the organism. The saving which is effected through emotion is most important, and this economy is reason for the rise of emotion in the struggle of existence. Those animals who are able, not merely to react on slight injuries to themselves, but also through fear, etc., to avoid all actual injury, have a very manifest advantage.

If now the rationale of the rise of emotion is apparent, let us next proceed to some analysis of emotional process in general. The mental mechanism by which anticipatory function is secured is certainly complex, and a complete analysis presents many difficulties.

In the incipiency stage, which we have just discussed, the organism was enabled to avoid the full force of the injurious by meeting it half-way with extensions from its own body, but we cannot suppose that this was purposely accomplished, or that the lesser pain conveyed in any form sense of the greater pain. There was no fear, no anger, not any experience at experience in consciousness. There is simply pain on less and less injury, but no anticipation of pain.

In early consciousness there is, of course, frequent return of a given object which becomes the occasion of a large number of objectifyings which are identical in nature yet do not contain sense of identity. There is repeated reaction to the same objective stimulus, yet with no sense of sameness, there is frequent cognition of the same thing yet no recognition. With primitive consciousness, no matter how often a thing is experienced, it is equally new; revival of the past is not stimulated, nor sense of identity attained. Mere return of a state is not sense of return, and no amount of re-occurrence or combinations thereof will make sense of re-occurrence. Re-occurrence of a psychosis is nothing more subjectively than occurrence unless there arise sense of re-occurrence or revival. The pure feeling states in primitive consciousness are perfectly identical in nature, and they arise on occasions which are the same, yet there is of course no sense of identity. A young child may see a thing a hundred times without recognising it; there are a hundred re-occurrences of state yet no sense of re-occurrence. The hundredth perception does not differ materially from the first, does not include any true representative element. The immediate image does not stand for the past, the mind does not revive previous presentation on the strength of it.

Mind is regarded by many as consisting fundamentally of vivid sense presentations and their faint reproductions, of sense impressions and their representations. That which has been repeatedly experienced has a tendency to re-occur without the particular objective stimulus, but merely indirectly by some connected stimulus, through an association of states. But this revival, however attained, does not constitute real representation, it does not really differ from the presentation simply because it re-occurs without the original particular objective stimulus. Representation in true sense of term is representation with sense of re-presentation. A representation is a repetition of a presentation with no consciousness of repetition or any added nature. Repetition is a fact in consciousness before it is a fact for consciousness. All presentations and re-presentations have mere immediate validity and value, they point to nothing, and mean nothing, there is no going beyond what is immediately given, no prescience of a possible experience.

Revival often occurs in mind without sense of revival, and so is not true representation. In disordered states of the nerves we frequently see objects which have no real existence, the states are revival states as objectively interpreted, yet there being no sense of revival they stand in consciousness for real presentations. When I see a person sitting in a chair but afterwards find that no one was there, I characterize the state very naturally as a mere imagination, a representation; yet in fact it was in subjective quality a presentation. We are not to psychologically classify, as is too often done, psychical states according to presence or absence of object, but as to sense of presence or absence of object. It is only as consciousness takes note with reference to object that there is differentiation in consciousness to make presentation and representation.

We must consider it probable that the earliest revivals by consciousness were solely of the unconscious sort, or, objectively speaking, were hallucinatory. A sense order is formed, which attends to a series of objective realities; let now, on some occasion, one of these objects drop out, yet there will be attaining of some sense of it as though it were present, and the proper reaction will be carried out. The mind gets its early revivals without sense of revival. They have presentative force, and are sensings of objective reality though there is no objective reality there at the time to sense.

These early simple revivals, which are all hallucinatory, perform an important function. They are practically anticipatory, in that the reaction is secured before the actual presence of the reality. Thus they save an actual bodily experience, though the mental is quite real, yet fainter than actual object would give. Thus with an enemy an animal will revive, upon slight indirect sensation, previous experiences, and it will have in ideal form, i.e., without the objective reality, a very real experience with what is to it real enemy, thus escaping before full advent of enemy. When a shadow alarms a low organism—and even very low organisms seem to react to shadows—there is no actual harm done to its members as would happen with a concrete body, and hence there is no direct pain. The shadow is yet taken for real body, and revival pains and revival sensations are attained with this, and there is consequent activity. Shadow does not appear as sign of enemy, but in itself a dangerous reality, so that anticipatory reaction is gained without actual representation. In most cases in low organisms what we take for fear or other emotion is probably no more than revival of the type of which this shadow experience is an example. What is actually unreal, being only revival, is taken for the real, and is acted on accordingly, and in most cases this action is of service as anticipatory. When the organism discovers the shadow to be but shadow, a something, not the object, yet connected with it, when it becomes a sign of further experience, this is representation as the basis of emotions such as fear and anger.

The pain intensity in the simple revivals, re-presentations, is doubtless less than in experience with objective realities, so there is a saving on this score in pseudo-direct experience. While reactions are secured upon this method without injury being actually inflicted, still there is loss of economy in this, that the activity is excessive under the circumstances. Priority of action to real injury is secured, but at an excessive expense of energy, almost equal to that in actual experience with the real thing.

This acting to a false reality, while it has a value for experience, is, as said, uneconomical, and it must sometimes not have the anticipatory force. The cheat and illusion is ultimately at some critical moment cognized by consciousness, revival comes to be estimated at its real worth, and sense of reality and unreality is formed. The revived presentation does not stand in and by itself alone, but it acquires a significance, and it loses the force of complete reality value. That which is brought into consciousness again is not only revival, but is felt to be such.

To constitute representation, then, there must be not merely revival, but sense of revival with some sense of unreality of revival form. But this would avail nothing save it brought in sense of its value for experience. The revival must not only be appreciated as such, but the relation to the experienceable must be cognized. The calling up of the past must be applied to experience. The sight of a fire not only calls up revivals, but there is the sense of the experienceable therewith, and an emotion which incites me to walk to the fire and receive warmth. Mere return and sense of return must be supplemented by sense of value for future experience. Representation is experience doubling on itself. All representation is more than representation of thing, revival; it is representation of experience as such, hence an experience of experience. We must always emphasize as the essence of representation not the revival, but the sense of the experienceable or experienced thereby conveyed.

The process to representation we see exemplified in measure in awaking from a dream. The dream itself, speaking from the objective point of view of observing psychologist who detects no real things in interaction with the body, is representative in nature; but, for the experiencing consciousness, there is no sense of revival, and all is presentative activity. Things are known as such, and not as dreamt or represented. Awaking is a gradual pouring in of sense of revival and of sense of objective unreality of the experience; we become conscious that the activity is no direct consciousness, but a recalling or reproduction. The dream image, which was so real to me while in the dream, I now hold as representative only, as having no immediate answering form and substance. When, as with the superstitious, the dream is felt to have significance, to have a meaning for life in pleasure-pain terms, then emotion becomes possible, and fear, hope and kindred feelings are excited.

We observe that representation is then a new order of consciousness. Representation cannot be attained by any combination of experiences, revival or direct, but it is a unique and reflex act. It is not a development of presentation, as an echo and re-echo of it; and the mere fact of absence of external cause or object does not constitute a cognition as representation. The objectifying is not self-contained, but it conveys a meaning for experience. Representation is an experience which includes some cognizance of or sense of experience, and it is thus the germ of self-consciousness and consciousness of consciousness. Experience comes to be more than a series of detached and isolated activities with no cognitive power beyond a direct and immediate apprehension, but by rising to some appreciation of itself it becomes forewarned and forearmed, able to consciously appreciate and attend to its own welfare.

We have also to emphasize this, that while representation involves a conscious re-objectifying, it must also include some re-feeling consciously accomplished of pain and pleasure. Revivals of pain and pleasure are felt and are appreciated as revivals, as having their basis not in present object, but in previous experience. It is by understanding feeling as experienced and experienceable, it is in view of pleasure-pain experience, that emotion arises. It is not sense of imminence of object, but of imminence of pain and pleasure, that awakens responsive emotion and so self-conservative action. Emotion always implies a pleasure or a pain in ideal sense of the experienceability of either. Representation as cognitive revival and sense thereof is subsidiary to representation as feeling revival with sense thereof. For instance, the representation of a tooth and of pain of toothache are correlative representations. Mere representation of cognition has no value in itself, is a mere idle panorama, save as it brings on representation of pleasure-pain. Unless representation of object implies representation of pain, there is no deterrent effect on the mind, and no proper bodily reaction.

We may believe that the order and basis of the representative side of mind is practically the same as indirect and simple activity, that the actual motive forces and originating impulses are pleasures and pains. We should suspect that the first revival attained was a pure feeling revival, and that the first representation was of pain and pleasure, and not of object, a consciously re-feeling rather than a consciously re-objectifying. The immediate value of the feeling side necessitates that all differentiation be initiated there.

Representation is only of experience of things or of pleasure-pain experience. It is always experience of experience, hence the expression, representation of an object, is, in strictness, inaccurate. Experience of things, as cognitive act, is always presentation. Yet early representation must be considered as very much adulterated by presentative elements. It was only slowly that representation was differentiated as a distinct power such as we find it in human consciousness; at the first it must have resembled the confused state that we sometimes experience between sleeping and waking when a given image often shifts from presentation value to representation value, and then back again.

Representation at the first is also purely concrete and particular. Bare appreciation of the experienceable does not include idea of experience. But representation in itself is merely a calling up and application of definite experiences as such. Experience as general term is not known, but only the particular facts as experiences.

The earliest emotions arise, of course, with reference to the bodily functions which have the most direct vital significance, as nutritive, reproductive, and motor activity. Very simple organisms seem to apprehend that a certain object is food before actually consuming, to have sense of the experience, and some emotive disturbance. The pleasure of feeding and incorporating into the bodily tissue is sensational, but any feeling previous or subsequent to this and with reference to this is emotional. A very young child feeds, and does not know food. Gradually it associates the visual sensation of whiteness of the milk with the immediate taste sensation and pleasure feeling. But the sense of whiteness at first arises only with and after the actual taste and pleasure experiences; it only gradually notices what gives it satisfaction or pain, thus repeating the evolution of mind, which is from feeling to sense, and not vice versâ. Only slowly does it attain power of appreciating whiteness previous to actual experience and as indicative of such, that is, a power of representation. Then emotions, as expectancy, and desire, become possible, and will can be stirred to active appropriation of food, a fact of the greatest importance in the struggle for existence. Once attaining the sense of the representative value of its cognitions, the child is enabled to consciously accomplish anticipatory actions.

An element which complicates emotion at a late stage is representation of representation in indefinite regressus. In advanced human consciousness, where mind is very reflective and introspective, this phase is prominent. The nuances of modern emotion are largely due to this mode of complication. Montaigne remarks that what he most fears is fear. As fear implies representation, fear of fear implies representation of representation, which in its turn may be feared, and so on ad infinitum. Spencer terms love of property a re-representative feeling; but this psychosis does not imply representation of representation, but merely representation of desirable realities. Desire of possession is an emotion, but not emotion at emotion. It is not an experience in view of representative experience, but with reference to a direct experience, that of ownership. Since we make representation the basis of emotion, it would be natural to make classes of emotion representative, re-representative, etc.; but this is quite too subtle a distinction to be fruitful or practical.

As there are stages of representation, so there are varying degrees of strength in the sense of representativeness. A colour may be recalled to consciousness several times as neither more nor less red, and precisely of the same quantity, yet the sense of its representation quality may differ greatly at each time. There are all degrees of intensity in this sense, from dimmest feeling, when the representation hovers on the confines of the presentation field, to the point of perfect conviction of representative nature. When consciousness is not exactly sure whether an object is directly seen or only recalled, is a presentation or only a revival, sense of representation is obviously at its lowest degree of intensity.

We have also to remark that in presentation and representation the object is not to be divorced from activity. It is a natural analogy that cognition as subjective-objective is a picturing, the picture and the object pictured seeming to be diverse but co-existent constituents of consciousness. Cognition seems to consist in both the thing as realized and the realizing act. It is an attitude of mind which is a holding on to a something which it has in its grasp. But there is no distinction in consciousness itself of the presented and the presenting, the represented and the representing, of product and process, of content and activity; there is only the presenting, the activity, which is itself the object. Sense of colour conveys, indeed, by the common vice of language that the colour exists for consciousness, and is perceived by consciousness. But, subjectively and psychologically speaking, the object is always no more than the objectifying, the thing no more than the activity. Thus the analysis into content and activity is fundamentally false; it assumes a world of objects which are merely at bottom object-sensings.

Emotion is an arousing and energizing. It is perturbation, disturbance, agitation, excitement. It is a throwing open the throttle and putting on a full head of steam. The whole organism quivers with the sudden inflow of force and life, is quickened to its highest pressure. In all higher psychic life it is a driving force of the utmost importance. However, the trend of evolution is in the direction of economy, and with the highest forms of consciousness emotion accomplishes its work even before arriving at agitation intensity. Feeling of the emotion type, that is, representative, is always at first a rather intense perturbation. Fear, for example, is with the lower minds always fright; with higher minds it often appears as dread. I stand on the railway track when a train is approaching, and a slight fear enables me to take the self-conservative action of stepping from the track; but with my dog, in similar circumstances, I judge by his hasty jump and general expression that his fear is always more intense and more generally disturbing. Emotion being a force which quickly tends to exhaustion, it is obvious that those animals will, ceteris paribus, have the advantage which react with the least expenditure. Thus the tendency of evolution is away from intense emotionalism.

In this emotion conforms to a general law. The earliest occurrences of any given form of psychosis are with strenuousness and with exaltation and excitement of the organism. We speak of fits of anger and gusts of passion, but for early consciousness we might also justly speak of fits of seeing and hearing. Common vision of external objects is for lower consciousness as rarely attained, and requires as much of force as beatific vision of seer and poet in the human mind. The new psychosis is but momentary, and implies high tension and great friction, but progress is toward continuity and ease of working. Emotion is in human life a tolerably constant element, like perception with whose representative side it is correlated, and within certain ranges it rises because of the force of heredity with apparent spontaneity.

We remark that the social significance of emotion is embodied in the word treat, as treat kindly, badly, etc. Our treatment of each other always means activities inspired by some emotion.

We must acknowledge that representation is very complex and difficult of analysis. For our present purpose, however, representation is a revival with sense of revival and unreality, and yet indicative of reality experienceable in pleasure-pain terms, and thus the occasion of emotion as stimulus of self-conservative action. The young child perceives no danger; its pleasures and pains are not related to things, and have not led to the evolution of a world of objects. Pain and pleasure lead it slowly to correlate its senses, so that the burnt child learns to dread the fire; the emotion of fear is aroused with cognition of the experienceable. Objectively, we must divide psychoses into those which directly result from actual engagement of the organism with objects, or the reverberations therefrom; subjectively, into simple self-contained states, and into reflex states which view experience, and so being representations involving emotion. Just how from re-experience sense of re-experience and of its value for experience—sense of pre-experience—arises, is something we have not particularly inquired into, but it is something that appears a mysterious and difficult problem. That the perception of object should ever carry with it sense of possibility or certainty of further experience, painful or pleasurable, is, when candidly considered, a remarkable and singular operation. The problems of origin of consciousness of self, of consciousness of consciousness, and of sense of reality seem unsolved, but I believe that a thorough study of representation would throw much light on these points; but this is not the place to pursue this investigation. When we take up representation—emotion life in detail, we may be able to make suggestions on some moot points.

CHAPTER VII
FEAR AS PRIMITIVE EMOTION[^[B]]

It may be considered as plausible that if the first feeling was pain, the first emotion was also of the pain character. The first representation of an object as painful induced that reaction of mind which we term an emotion, and the painful emotion we call fear. That the first emotion to appear was fear, as fright, seems likely when we consider that the general alertness and defensiveness imperatively required in the struggle for existence is thereby most immediately and simply attained. The acquirement of the power to become frightened is plainly a most important requisite for self-preservation, and thus is indicated as a very early factor in conscious life. An animal being devoured by another may merely suffer pain without any perception of the object as pain-giving and to give pain; but if it attains this perception, there may be added to the stimulus of simple pain that of fright. The direct actual pain may be but small, and so inducing but feeble reaction, as when some less sensitive portion is being injured; but if there occurs a vivid representation of potential pain, fright happens and stimulates most strenuous endeavours, and so rids the animal both of the immediately and the prospectively painful. Thus emotion acts as a complement to simple feeling, and also secures practically anticipatory reaction. Animals which must receive actual injury before experiencing pain are clearly inferior to those which experience emotion-pain before the injury is actually received. Other things being equal, the most easily frightened have, in the midst of many destructive agents, the best chance of survival and of perpetuating their kind.

[B]. Originally appeared in part in Philosophical Review, i. pp. 241-256.

It is unnecessary to dwell at length on child life and savage life as illustrating the primitive quality and function of fear. The earliest experiences of the child with things are lessons of fear. The burnt child dreads the fire, and thus is enabled to preserve himself from threatened injury. Fear is a primary and most important motive to action in a very wide range of the lower mental life. Those who have observed animals and man in a state of nature are always greatly impressed with the constant and large part which this emotion plays in their consciousness. With the timid and weaker species, like the rabbit and squirrel, it is likely that a majority of their cognitions prompt to fear or are prompted by fear, and with some persecuted races of savages the same may be said.

The necessity and value of anticipatory reaction being acknowledged in the struggle of existence, we plainly see a primitive motive thereto in fear, and the earliest emotional life which we can clearly interpret likewise seems to be fear.

It is sufficiently easy to see the general function of fear and its primitive character, but we find it very hard to make a satisfactory analysis, and to show the exact steps of its evolution. It is obvious, however, in the first place, that fear, like other emotions, is purely indirect and secondary experience; it pre-supposes previous painful experience of the feared object. Pain experienced in connection with cognition of object is the basis of all fear. Animals that have not felt pain from man do not fear him. But fear while thus based on previous direct experience is always hindered by simultaneous direct experience, as, for example, sensation. Thus when we, whip in hand, say to a child crying from fear, “I will give you something to cry for,” we imply the law that direct pain and sensation tend to supplant indirect feeling as emotion. This common expression emphasizes the essential representativeness of emotion, its imaginary nature, as also the supplanting power of direct real experience. The sight of the whip inspires fear in the child who has been whipped, but this fear is in the course of a punishment wholly eliminated by the direct pain endured. The direct experience is thus the basis of every fear, but only as it is cognized, and not felt.

The great difficulty in analysing fear is in clearly apprehending the mode in which previous experience is utilized. If we could study in ourselves the genesis of a simple emotion, we should doubtless be enabled to see the steps by which experience reacts upon itself so as to give a reflex form like the emotion of fear, but this is hardly possible. However, cognition is evolved at the instance of pain, and all objects are viewed, not for themselves, but in their feeling significance. Cognition is embedded in feeling, and at first is a mere tone of feeling. Things are not at first known for themselves but solely as sources of present pleasure and pain. Things are perceived in and through the feeling which has stimulated the perception. The immediate feeling value of the object is given by the very origin and process of cognition. When an animal is pained by contact with a sharp rock, and this pain stimulates cognition of the rock, this is solely on the pain account. Repeated experiences enable the percept to arise at stimulus of less and less pain, and so the proper reaction is accomplished more and more economically.

We may say that the order of evolution is this: first, a pain; second, a cognition of pain-giver—“it hurts”—third, emotion about pain-giver, as fear thereof—“I am afraid of it.” Primitive and normal cognition always implies emotion as impelling self-preservative action. Knowledge which does not spring into emotion and action is abortive. At first the known is always startling.

The original pain-impelled cognition brings in the painful emotion, primitive fear. And as knowledge has brought in fear, so fear reacts on knowledge, and fearfulness incites to knowing even when the pain from object ceases. Thus before any actual experience of an object it may be known and felt about. Thus that habit of objectivity is formed, of alertness, of a fearful sensing and perceiving, which is noticeable in many animals. A cognitive-emotive, emotive-cognitive life is formed and developed. It is a tremendous stride onward to be able through fearful cognition to wholly pre-perceive and anticipate the injurious, instead of having to suffer it in part before being enabled to get away.

Now primitive fear and all primitive emotion plainly utilizes the past experience as interpreting the future; emotion is about a known potency. Yet it is often stated that emotion is but a summation of revivals of past experience. Having often been burnt by fires that I have coincidently been looking at, it sometimes happens that I see a fire which has not yet harmed me, but still the mere sight affects me with what I call the emotion of fear, which, in closest analysis, means merely the revival of the burning pains associated with this seeing in the past. “I am afraid” equals “I re-experience the pains of burning” by suggestion. Pains faintly re-occurring constitute the painful fear. There is in this mass of re-awakenings no real cognition of experience and no feeling about it as such, no psychosis at the experienceable. And it is certainly true that when a fixed sequence of experiences tend to recur together, there will follow upon the cognition, revival waves of pain before any actual increase of pain is really inflicted in the given case. These waves stand for, and are the echoes of, the former real pain sequences of cognition. Thus the perception of a great mass of ice will often cause a shivery feeling, a painful sensation is revived as correlated with former cognition experiences. Even the image or representation, the purely and consciously ideal cognition, may bring in painful feeling, as when I say, “It makes me shiver to think of it.” Here the painful sensation-bringing idea is cognized as such, but the representation here is the occasion of a direct painful sensation, and evidently does not imply fear or other emotion.

While not arising from actual injuries, revivals strengthen both cognition and volition. They have recurred before further hurtful experiences with the fire which originally incited them. These revival pains of previous sequences to the cognition, which are carried along with the present cognition, are real enough in themselves, yet they are objectively anticipatory of actual injury. The whole order of previous experience is by the nature of mind and nervous system re-enacted before the actual injuries are inflicted. It is always a race between mind and nature, but it is a prime function of mind to anticipate practically the movements of nature. Mind by its revival forms accomplishes this, but if it lags in its work the real injuries are mercilessly inflicted by slow but sure nature. When the sequence of revival is quicker than the objective sequence, the reactions anticipate objective order, and thus a manifest economy is achieved. But pain revivals of this kind are not fear, nor is there a real pre-perception. Since the revival forms are, to the observer’s point of view, incentive to anticipatory reaction, psychologists must often, especially with low organisms, mistake them for fear; the animal is often, doubtless, merely suffering revival pains when it appears to be fearing pain. Thus we may suspect that organisms which seem to fear shadows or real objects are often merely suffering revival pains brought up in conjunction with the cognition, and not really fearing as result of perceiving feeling quality inherent in the object. Manifestation of pain must often be mistaken for manifestations of emotion, and there is as yet no accurate objective determination for fear or other emotions.

Revival pains are not representations of pains as in some way coming from object. Emotion requires representation, and cannot occur in any presentation or re-presentation chain. True pre-perception is not merely perceiving the thing before its effects in feeling are experienced, but it is a representing the feeling quality of the object before, in any given case, this quality is directly experienced. This obviously rests on past experience, but the connecting of object with pleasure-pain experience is at all times, as before intimated, equally a problem. Emotion and representation are built not of revivals, but upon them perceived as such. At some critical moment, in some rather early period in mental development, a consciousness which was pain plus sense of object, realized, under the pressure of struggle for existence, the feeling quality of the object, and there arose with the knowledge of object as pain-giver the painful emotion. And as soon as object is not merely cognized, but cognized as pain-giver, it may be feared. The moment that object was known as a pain agent, then fear of the object came, and thus true anticipatory action arose. We are said, indeed, to fear objects, to fear men, animals, etc., but, in truth, the fear is never of the object as such, but only in view of its pain agency. The cognizing the experienced and experienceable as such seems then a peculiar and distinct process in fear and in all emotion, a genus apart which cannot be constituted by interaction of simple elements. The growth of mind is largely in multiplying and enlarging the signs of experience.

The connecting once achieved of object with pain, it becomes increasingly easy to cognize the feeling value of objects, and before full and extreme pain experience therefrom to pre-react through emotion. Thus emotion saves both direct pain and injury. As it becomes a permanent tendency, and an impulse of consciousness to proceed from all pure feelings to cognition of object, so also to cognition of object in its feeling quality, and thus by inherent tendency it ultimately comes about that there is attaching of pain to various objects cognized, even when there is no immediate experience of pain to be connected therewith. Finally the precedent inciting pains to cognition become such minor factors, and knowledge arises with such apparent spontaneity, that emotion as involving pain significance becomes dominant rather than the immediate pain. An order of consciousness becomes established in which the notable event is emotional cognition of experience values as bringing in permanent emotion rather than an order of pleasure-pain inciting cognition with evanescent emotion. But at the first it is evident that fear was but a slight event in a consciousness which was mainly absorbed in immediate pain experience and some sense of object. It is so habitual and instinctive for us to perceive all things as having feeling value, that it is most difficult to appreciate the standpoint of a consciousness which is just attaining emotion life.

The preliminary elements to simple primitive fear, as expressed by any such phrase as, “it hurts,” are at least four: pain, cognition of object, cognition of the pain, cognition of the pain agency of object. These operations, as being at first successive, do not necessarily imply, however, sense of time. The consciousness of a pain is certainly, at first, consciousness of pain really past, yet not consciousness of it as past. The pain stands as immediately antecedent act to the consciousness which is cognition of it, but sense of experience is not thereby sense of experience in time. The sense of time-relations of experiences is wholly subsequent to the simple sense of experience. All experience is, of course, in time, but far from being of time.

An organism, which has suffered knowingly from an object, and so feared, attains at length the power of fearing antecedent to any real injury. This seems to be brought about somewhat in the following manner: If I in any way, as by a pin pricking, rouse a sleeping animal to a cognition of an object which has often injured it, and which it has often feared, immediately there would re-occur the original concomitants of the cognition in the previous cases; there would be pain, cognition of pain, ascription to object, and fear, all merely revivals, and happening most probably before any actual injury, etc., received in the present case. Now these revivals, as before insisted, do not and cannot in themselves alone form a new fear. This is only constituted when the revival pains are known as such, when they are not merely presented in consciousness, but represented as belonging to past experience of thing, and so to be experienced. The thing is thereby truly interpreted for its feeling value. Not merely pain, as being experienced, is connected with thing, but as having been experienced, and to be experienced. Thus only arises that sense of the experienceable, that real apprehension for the future, which is so valuable an acquisition in the struggle for existence. Feeling quality comes thus to be assigned as real and permanent property of things, and every cognition comes to imply representation of feeling value, and so to be a basis for emotion. But all sense of experienceability is founded on sense of experience; the sense of things as possibilities of sensation and feeling is based on actual relatings of feelings to objects in simple direct experiences.

Fear is in itself pre-eminently a painful state, and we have to inquire as to the origin and nature of this pain. The statement of the problem in general form is, how does that which does not yet please or pain, but is only cognized as about to do so, give immediate pleasure or pain?

We have already expressed the opinion that fear is based on more than mere pain revivals; there must be true representation, the revival must be appreciated as representation of past experience, and indicative of future. The painful agitation consequent on prospect of pain seems, indeed, to include as pain element more than revival pain, but it is only seeming. Where does the pain come from which a person feels at the mere prospect of pain unless from the past? The pain is, of course, not the identical pain feared. Again, one cannot see how a cognition in itself, entirely empty of feeling, can cause a pain, except as acting as a link in a chain of association whereby conjoined past pains are revived. So far as fear is pain, it is, we may be told, revival, for representation of pain is not pain, and cannot cause pain. The pain which arises from cognition of pain to be experienced appears in a strict analysis to be wholly re-occurrence stimulated thereby, and not any new and peculiar mode of pain at pain. That this is the case is apparent from the fact that we can only have the pain of fear so far as we have experienced pain. Poignant pains experienced are the basis of poignant pain in fear. The knowledge that you are soon to re-experience an intense pain leads to an intense dread, in which the intense pain is revived from former experience. There are, to be sure, in the phenomena of fear in highly developed consciousness, complex pains which cannot be ascribed to revivals, reflexes upon consciousness of the great tension and agitation thereof, pain of loss of self-possession and self-power, and other modes which proceed from consciousness of consciousness, but this does not bear upon the question how mere cognition of pain, as to be experienced, can in itself give pain; how there arises from mere apprehension a pain which is more than and distinct from the revival pains.

But, however we may be puzzled to see how mere cognition of experienceable pain develops a peculiar pain which is the essence of fear, yet we must acknowledge its production to be a fact. We may say, indeed, that the bare thought of pain even when conveyed by the printed word—the abstract sign of an arbitrary vocal name—is not without a tinge of a peculiar fear-pain which does not wholly consist of revivals. When preparing to go out into the storm on a very cold day I have pain in anticipation of the pain I am to receive from the bitterly cold wind. Now I may have preliminary shiverings, and there may be recurrent painful sensations as I look intently at the raging elements, pains which return from actual experiences which I have before undergone and at the time knowingly connected with wind and snow. But all these revivals, while the basis of my fear, do not give the distinct pain quality of the fear. The pain which I do experience when I actually step into the biting blast I know at once to be entirely distinct in quality from that which I before felt at the anticipation, the real pain, of fear. Again, when I say, “I was deeply pained to hear of it,” and when I say, “The noise pained me greatly,” I indicate that difference between purely mental distress and sensuous pain, between pain at representation and pain referred to presentation, which is to be emphasized in all our study of emotion. With a man in the hands of hostile Indians the tortures of fear are quite distinct in quality from the tortures actually endured. The agony of fear is a genus apart from the agony of physical pain.

Again, if the pain in fear were derived from revivals, then the nature of the pain in different states of fear would be as different as the sensations feared. But as a matter of fact the pain in fear of cold, fear of heat, of famine, of punishment, etc., is substantially of the same quality. I may fear one more than another, but the real mental agitation and pain which constitute the fear are in all cases essentially the same. If the pain in fear were sensation revivals, then fear of cold and fear of heat would be quite diverse and contrary in quality of pain value, but we all know that the dread of a cold day and of a hot day are in themselves essentially the same in nature. As far as the states are pure fear and have a pain quality, the conscious activity in both is entirely similar.

Further, if the pain in fear were wholly of revival nature, not only should we expect fear of different sensations to be correspondingly distinct, but we should also expect the pain in fear to never exceed in amount and intensity the pain feared as indicated by measure of past experience. But we know that our fears are often much more painful than pain feared and than our experience of past pain. The pang of fear, of sudden fright, is often more acute and intense than any direct pain we have ever experienced. The terrible convulsions of fear which we see in the insane give evidence of pain which could not have been reflection from direct experience. That excessive and sudden fear which turns men’s hair gray in a few hours and transforms their whole physical system is plainly not any revival from the individual’s past experience. As revealed by its effects it is often, perhaps, greater than the whole amount of pain they have ever suffered. Where, in the direct-experience form, pain is greater in the fear than the real pain suffered, we express the fact by the common phrase, “more scared than hurt.” In all such cases the pain in fear is not the revival of past experiences of the object feared.

Fear is, in the main, the peculiar pain coming from consciousness of experienceable pain, but in general in all complex consciousness it is marked by dissolution and weakening of mental force. There is a shrinking of will, and a clouding of cognition, a general unsettling of all mental elements, a commotion or agitation which destroys the organic consensus of consciousness. But any excessive functioning of some element in consciousness, of emotion life, as fear, or of any other form, is unbalancing and detracts from normal activity of the whole. Fear, however, in its normal measure and form arose and was developed as a desirable stimulant; where it becomes paralyzing in its force, it is pathological in quality. Also where fear is pathologically intense it tends to disappear in sensation feared. Cognition becomes so weakened that sense of representativeness is lost, the thing feared is no longer brought before the mind in its potential quality, but is immediately apprehended as present in its influence—though really objectively absent—hallucination is produced, and fear naturally reverts to its earliest and direct form in immediate experience. As cognition is still further weakened the sense of object as giving pain is lost and fear in any form entirely disappears. The pain is not felt which before was feared to be felt. Fear thus in the general order of its disappearance repeats the order of its appearance and growth.

Fear always includes some sense of object. The apprehension of something evil to happen is the basis of all fear, but the thing, or, subjectively speaking, the objectifying, may be extremely vague. We may fear that some harm is to befall us, but what and how, we know not. We must suppose that in early stages this bare objectifying of approaching pain was a regular incipient form, that an indefinite fear preceded every case of defined fear. We, as a rule, attain a full objectifying with such ease and rapidity that this form does not often appear.

A complete fear movement, then with reference to cognition includes four stages: first, a very general sense of object as about to give pain; second, an increasing definition of object up to the maximum of clearness, thus marking the highest efficiency of the fear function; third, a decreasing definition of object till, fourth, a purely indefinite objectifying is again reached. Every fear, if it attains a normal life, will rise, culminate, and decline in this way. Even in man, where the full development of single simple psychoses rarely proceed undisturbed, there is yet observed a general tendency toward these stages. I awaken in the night at a sudden noise with slight and vague fear; suspicious sounds increase my fear and I listen and look more intently till I see clearly and quite fully crouching near the bed a dark body which I make out to be an armed burglar; as he approaches with his pointed weapon fear will most likely become so intense that I see less and less clearly, and a shot might terrify me into vague but very intense fear. If the object is discerned to be not a burglar but a chair, the fear quickly lapses. At a certain point of maximum clearness either a weakening or an intensifying of fear weakens cognition. Too much or too little pain is equally injurious to the knowing activity. Low psychisms examine and clearly define only that from which they have something to fear or hope.

The qualitative relation of the pain of fear to the pain feared varies greatly with the evolution of mind. Fear-pain could not have originated as a substitutionary function for the real pain except by being at the first somewhat less in quality than the pain to be endured, otherwise there would be no economy in the function. The progress of this function is to secure at less and less expense of fear-pain the suitable reaction. The function of fear being to escape a greater direct pain by a less indirect one, the progress of the function is in diminishing the amount of fear-pain for required effectiveness. The small original gain in the ratio is increased by small increments till in the highest minds proportion of fear-pain to pain feared might be represented by ¹⁄_∞. The pain in the usual fear which commonly induces me to step from the track before an approaching train, or which enables me after reading some advice on the subject to take precautions against the cholera, is evidently in infinitesimal relation to the pain feared. When fear is unsuccessful, as in anticipating a visit to the dentist, we, of course, suffer a double pain, both the fear-pain and the pain feared.

Often we must observe that the pain of fear is equal to or greater than the experience feared, and we have to ask how this disadvantageous excess could have been evolved. Often the pain of anticipation turns out to be far greater than the pain anticipated. However, a little reflection assures us that the excess of fear in many cases is only in appearance. We do not fear too much upon the judgment we have formed as to the coming pain, but we have by error of judgment assigned too much value to the pain. When a person being initiated into a secret society trembles with fear at being told to jump from a precipice, when he really is to jump but a few feet downward, his fear was perfectly just according to his judgment. If his belief is perfectly assured, the mortal fear will make him offer the most strenuous resistance and most likely secure his release from the ordeal. In all such cases the feeling is right enough, but the estimate of future experience is inaccurate. When an animal is terrified at its own shadow the fear is justly proportioned to the estimate of danger, which, however, happens to be erroneous. In the evolution of mind in the struggle for existence, more and more accurate calculations of possible injury are attained, and fear becomes more and more rational. Educated men fear only what is worthy of fear; they fear many things that lower minds do not, and do not fear many things they do. The true excess of fear is where we fear against judgment, as when, knowing the safety of travel by rail, I am yet constantly in fear while aboard a railway train. When I still continue to fear, though I know the fear to be groundless, this is a true hypertrophy of fear. We constantly observe those who are fearful and timid against their own reason. When dangers known are compared with dangers obscure or unknown—and perceived to be unknowable—the fear of the unknown often prevails against the fear of the known, and we prefer with Hamlet to fear the ills we have than fly to others we know not of.

I must in conclusion express my conviction that while the physiological and objective study of fear and other emotions is of very considerable value, yet it is only introspective analysis which can reveal the true nature and genesis of fear and all emotion. What fear is and what is the process of its development can only be determined by the direct study of consciousness as a life factor in the struggle for existence. This I attempt in the present chapter, with the main result that fear, as indeed every emotion, does not consist of pain or cognition-revivals in any form, but is a feeling reaction from the representation of the feeling potency of the object.

CHAPTER VIII
THE DIFFERENTIATION OF FEAR

Fear, according to the analysis we have made, includes representation of object in its feeling value, predominant tone of mental pain, and will recoil. Fear in its primitive form, as we have seen, was a sudden and transitory phenomenon in consciousness, a simple thrill of feeling awaking will to spasmodic violent effort in the struggle for existence. All states of fear in early psychical history were practically alike in quantity, quality and intensity. Every fear is like every other fear in its pain tone and will effort. Every object and event considered as painful is equally feared; there is no distinction of more or less fear, nor any qualitative differentiation. Very young children manifest equal fear disturbance and seemingly identical in nature on all fearful occasions. Prospect of vaccination, of a scratch, of the pulling of a tooth, of a whipping, of an amputation, produce equally paroxysms of fear, waves of painful emotion, which discharge themselves in muscular contortions. The lowest animals likewise appear in all cases frightened to the same degree and in the same way. It must be said, however, that this period of simple undifferentiated fear is undoubtedly very brief, and embraces in the individual and the race but a comparatively small number of phenomena; but a careful study, even by the method of approximation will, I believe, show it to be a definite initial phase.

While this primitive undifferentiated fear, which acts with the same force and quality in all instances, confers upon the organism which possesses it a great superiority over those which do not possess it, in the race for life, and thus marks a great advance in psychical progress, yet it is manifestly uneconomical in its action in that there should be precisely the same amount and quality of reaction in all cases. So when a considerable number of organisms had attained the power to fear, competition would inevitably lead to some differentiation, and this doubtless first in the direction of greater economy. The animal which could fear much or little, according to the degree of actual injury threatened, would have a great advantage in the struggle for existence over his fellows. The amount of pain in prospect is definitely gauged, and the fear pain becomes proportioned thereto, and so the will effort and muscular exertions. Fear in its earliest form sets the whole motor apparatus going at the highest rate, the whole organism is at the highest pitch of activity, and life and death struggle happens at every apprehension of pain, no matter how small the reality. Later, through discrimination, animals become capable of either a slight scare or a great fear, according to circumstances. The fear force is gradually rationalized and made less spasmodic and so more adaptive. The fear pain becomes proportioned to the real amount of pain and so to injury actually imminent.

This mode of evolution by decrease rather than increase of intensity may seem peculiar. Fear, however, certainly originates as a simple outburst of considerable strength relative to the individual organism, and the first step in fear growth is a development in the representation-of-object element in fear which tends to reduce the essence of fear as pain-emotion. Spasmodic primitive fear in becoming intelligent loses intensity in the essential feeling aspect. Other things being equal, the intensity of fear is inversely as the definition of its object. The dimly and uncertainly known is always thereby more fearful than the well known and familiar. However, as regards primitive psychism, we must remark that all phenomena are very large in relative quantity to individual capacity, but very small in absolute psychological quantity. A fear which convulses a very small mind would make but a very small disturbance in a mind of very great capacity. An amount of fear which would absorb completely one consciousness capacity, would require comparatively little force in a mind of greater calibre. The lowest minds are possessed by their fears, higher minds possess them, do not “lose their heads,” i.e., both cognition and will co-exist as stable controlling elements. Primitive consciousness is constantly at saturation point, phenomena occur only in linear consecutive order, and every phenomenon is a feeling-willing which absorbs the low conscious capacity. It may then, perhaps, be regarded that the evolution of fear is not through absolute decrease in intensity, but an increase of conscious capacity, whereby greater definition of object becomes possible and coincident with fear-pain of original quantity. The complete determination of this question must then await a fuller analysis, but the relation to individual capacity in the evolution of fear remains apparent. Whatever may be the absolute quantity and intensity of the fear phenomenon, its relative quantity and intensity changes very greatly.

The number of adaptive degrees of fear which are ultimately evolved and of which any very high mind is susceptible, is quite beyond our present means of psychological analysis. We have no phobometer to register all the gradations, other than the popular usage of language, but between “I was scared just the least bit,” and “I was scared stiff,” or “scared to death,” there is certainly a vast number of intermediaries. Terror is an intensive term denoting strong fear, and a terrible fright is a redundancy for extreme fear. By the use of adjectives and various qualifying phases we roughly denote a number of fear degrees, but scientific precision is wholly lacking. Such expressions as “I have very little fear of him,” “I fear him a little,” “I fear him greatly,” “I fear him very much,” convey a meaning indeed, but no exact measurement is indicated.

Terror is often used as a term not merely for fear in general, but for fear which paralyzes by its force. The individual is often “rooted to the spot” by terror, he loses all power of motion and becomes as an inert mass. With animals even of the lower grades this is doubtless often a pathological manifestation. We find that predatory animals are often furnished with apparatus to inspire benumbing fear in their victims. Various means, as inflation of size, strident noises, etc., are employed with great effect. On the other hand, we find that predacious animals seek to reduce the stimulus of fear in their victims by quieting and alluring methods. Both hypertrophy and atrophy of fear are disadvantageous, and we should see then in paralyzing terror an instance of over-development of useful function which produces the direct opposite of the normal fear. Fear, the great means of salvation to all weaker organisms, is also in its highest intensities taken advantage of by enemies. Hence the due graduation and restraint of fear becomes one of the most important lines of mental evolution for the organism preyed upon, but the over stimulation or undue weakening of the fear function in its prey becomes a most important object and advantage for the predacious animal. This evolution is often by the individual disadvantageous variation when this is advantage to some other organism; and, as living beings are soon divided into the two classes, those who flee and those who pursue, the destroying and preserving of the chief psychological defence becomes a leading form of psychic growth of a pathologic character. Fear in its origin was certainly a stimulant to action and not sedative. However, so far as fear effects an unconscious mimicry of death it often reaches thereby negatively to conservative action, and paralyzing fear is thus explained by the general law of advantage in the struggle for existence. We can then trace a double evolution of fear, on the one hand as leading to action, on the other to inaction, but the former will, I think, be found to be the primitive form. The primary and main function of fear in all life is in a duly modulated energizing in view of approaching injury, and the depressing mode is secondary and exceptional.

Again, we must remark upon the sense of personal weakness, or, objectively stated, the sense of overwhelming power, as entering into fear. I cannot agree with Mr. Mercier that this is a mark of all fear. In its origin and early gradations fear, as we have noticed it in the immediately preceding paragraphs, requires no other cognition than that of pain to come. Self-measurement of power in relation to that of pain giving object is certainly too complex to be primitive, nor do the simplest forms of fear as we observe them in ourselves and judge of them in lower organisms pre-suppose any such process. Primitively every perception of painful event fills consciousness with the impetuous self-conserving fear revulsion. There is neither time nor capacity for estimating one’s own strength or weakness in relation to opposing power. By the very low intelligence only the immediately imminent is apprehended, and action is always immediate, short, and decisive. In fact, it is now probable that originally painful events are really actualized by the mind, and the fear is thus at the event as actual, rather than as ideal, as represented as to be. Certain it is that mind, in its hurry to get ahead of natural harmful agencies in their action, must in its earliest pre-apprehensions have no room or time for dynamic interpretations.

Of course the whole value of sense of one’s own superior power is in fear, thereby securing the contingency of the painful event, but sense of contingency upon one’s own efforts no doubt first occurs at a considerably advanced stage, much beyond that of simple fear. Primitively mind regards events as being, or about to be, with no sense either of their certainty or uncertainty. Early mind cannot appreciate certainty, for it knows not uncertainty, it has not yet accomplished the prevision to which certainty and uncertainty may attach; it cannot say, “I fear this will happen,” or “I fear that will not happen,” but only “I fear or do not fear the thing happening, the event coming.” The world of the earliest psychical life is simply factual, and the fears are simple and wholly undifferentiated. Fear certainly antedates the perception of contingency and of one’s own agency in producing contingency. Even in the ordinary fears in human consciousness sense of personal power in relation to pain-giver is actually subsequent to the fear phenomenon and reacts upon it, but is not constitutive of it in its first impulse.

Fear is first graduated by the increasing discrimination as to the amount of pain and injury to be inflicted, and later it is graduated by the sense of the painful event as more or less contingent, either in the natural course of things, or as determined by the individual’s strength in warding off impending evil. Taking chances and risks is learned, and becomes often very advantageous. Fear is also greatly diminished and modified by acquiring a sense of one’s individual power in overcoming or resisting pain given. The rabbit, often chased by a clumsy dog, evidently fears him less and less. Man, both by his increasing knowledge of natural contingencies and by his increasing power over elemental and animal pain-giving forces, fears less and less. The inevitable evil, sure to come, and sure to overcome, is that which strikes intensest fear, as we often see in criminals led to execution.

The discrimination between the animate and the inanimate also differentiates fear. When this distinction is fully achieved, the attitude of mind toward each in fear is plainly distinct. The thing, perceived as having psychic powers, and capable of purposive evil and self-directive of its movements, awakens thereby a complex of feelings which rapidly develops beyond our present powers of analysis to follow them. For the present sketch of the early natural history of fear it is sufficient merely to remark this differentiation as one of prime value in the struggle for existence.

However, as we have before suggested (p. 106), the nature of fear, purely in itself considered, does not depend on the nature of the object feared; thus fear of cold and fear of heat are perfectly alike as psychic facts, though having regard to very diverse physical facts. Animistic mind, indeed, reacts to all objects differently from naturalistic mind, yet in its essential quality fear is identical in both. In fear of a storm, both as a purely physical manifestation and as the expression of the psychical nature of a deity, the fear act is by itself quite the same; the fear pain and the willing are quite the same, but on the more external, the representation side, they do greatly differ, the complication being greater in the latter instance, and introducing a complex of feelings. Fear in the narrowest sense does not reach to the object to consider its nature, to regard its objective quality, for this is the base of very different feelings; but fear proper is engrossed in object purely for its immediate pain significance; it is given up to viewing personal pain infliction. I am inclined to think, then, that we shall find that mind is primarily neither animistic nor naturalistic. The only interpretation of object which is first made is as pain or pleasure given, and a personalizing and impersonalizing stage is decidedly later. We must remember that mind at first goes only so far as it is positively obliged to by the struggle for existence; and hence, though it is quite impossible for us to fully realize such a simple state, yet originally objects were discriminated merely as pleasure and pain sources. Object at first was of the more vague sort, merely an indefinite locus for pleasure-pain; something painful or pleasurable is the discrimination, but attribution of sentiency or insentiency is not yet reached, for no interpretation of the sort is yet imperatively demanded. It is so ingrained in us to perceive beings as either living or non-living, that it is quite impossible to thoroughly conceive a state so primitive as to be unable to rise to this attribution or distinction. However, like the bare statement of a fourth dimension in space, the statement that pre-animistic mind exists or has existed, a way of looking at objects entirely without reference to their personal or impersonal quality—this is intelligible, and hypothetically required by a complete theory of the evolution of mind. In a dolce far niente of perfect sensuousness, even the adult man sometimes approximates this stage, and the actions of very young infants are best interpreted as expressions of a similar state. Things for them seem entirely uninterpreted and unperceived, except as imparters of crass sensual pains and pleasures, as mere pleasure-pain potencies.

A very important differentiation of fear is brought about by the extension of the time sense. Fear begins with a minimum of time sense; only the immediately impending, the absolutely imminent danger, suffices to awaken fear. But in the struggle for existence the advantage of being influenced for action by the more and more remote, in time, determines a rapid extension in time to feared events. With man actions are thus influenced by fears, which reach even beyond the present life. The cautious and prudent are those whose fears are far-sighted, and who, conducting themselves accordingly, maintain supremacy over the short-sighted and improvident. Carpe diem is, from the point of view of evolutionary psychology, the cry of the retrogressive fool.

The time differentiation of fear is recognised in popular language in the term—dread. I am frightened in the night by a sudden noise; I am alarmed for the safety of a child awaking near a precipice; but I dread next week’s task. Of course dread, like other popular psychological terms, is plastic, and often denotes fear in general, and is often used intensively, or to denote vague fear, still it is the most correct and distinctive term for fear of a more or less remote event. It would be most interesting to investigate the relation of distance in time of feared event to intensity of the fear, but we have as yet no standards for estimating in mathematical ratios either time or intensity psychologically considered. It is not, of course, physical determination of time as minutes, hours, etc., with which we are concerned, but only with variations in sense of nearness or remoteness of event. Our sense of time is most variable, and fluctuates from many causes, so that hours sometimes seem minutes, and minutes at other times seem hours. However, there is, doubtless, other things being equal, some fixed relation between our sense of the nearness and remoteness of a fearful event and the intensity of the fear, but we may well doubt whether it can ever be reduced to any law of inverse squares like that of physical intensities. A criminal sentenced to die at the expiration of thirty days certainly has a marked increase in fear as time approaches, or rather, as he has sense of the time approaching, but a quantitative analysis is beyond our present powers.

A most important but tolerably late differentiation is the altruistic form of fear—fear, not of others, but for others. Psychic life is at first wholly self-centred, there is no perception of things or interest in them otherwise than as bearing on the experience of the self. Other selves are wholly unrecognised, and pain-giving effects to them are then unperceivable. In very young infants we see a close approximation to primitive selfish life. The exact point in the history of life when altruism is developed by the struggle of existence is not at present determinable, but we may well believe that it arose with the evolution of the sexes in separate individuals. Fear for mate and offspring is obviously an essential advantage in the progress and perpetuation of the kind. Pure altruism is not at first attained, and there is only the faintest gleam of appreciation of pain-states in others, and genuine feeling therefor. The sexual appetite is, like other appetites, purely selfish at first, and the animal fears the loss of what will satisfy in an individualistic way, quite as he fears that food may be taken away or destroyed. Even in higher psychisms much that we readily interpret as altruistic is often mainly personal; it is not a true regard and emotion at pain and injury imminent to others, a manifestation of feeling at their experience as such, but mostly a feeling for their experience only so far as it involves our pleasure-pain. When sociality and interdependence of organisms is attained as a great advantage in the struggle of life, when personal experience is perceived as dependent upon experiences of others, then a feeling value attaches to the experienceable for others, yet selfishly at first. Even parental oversight and care must originally have been selfish—the satisfaction of a personal craving, rather than the promotion of the well-being of another, considered for its own sake. Real and pure altruism must, indeed, be accounted, even in human society, as a rare phenomenon, perfect self-forgetfulness being almost impossible even for the most developed consciousness, owing to the strength and persistence of an indefinite heredity of selfishness. Fear for others is, then, in truth, merely an indirect fear for ourselves; and particularly so is this true in all lower consciousness. But we must acknowledge that elements of real altruism do enter and do grow in value and strength in the evolution of consciousness, and we must, if we adhere strictly to the principle of personal advantage as determining evolution, find a reason here for a singular and seemingly incompatible manifestation. Regard for the good of others is not always indirectly regard for personal good, and self-sacrifice is certainly an element in psychic life, even in lower consciousness, where we often seem to see a distinct struggle between egoistic fear and altruistic fear, as in animals protecting their young. But we see the same in an animal defending food from being acquired by its enemies.

Advantage for the race is certainly gained, but this wholly unconsciously; and it plays no part in the actual psychism of the individual. In a highly social, which is also in the most effective and advantageous mode of life, it is certain that the purely self-seeking will be at a disadvantage in general, whereas those who give themselves up to help others are by others so helped, that the final status of the individual is higher and better than if he had been wholly a self-seeker. However, he who, perceiving this law, sets out to be altruistic for his own ends, invariably suffers defeat in the long run, for entire disinterestedness can alone avail. But the problem of altruism, from an evolutionary point of view, cannot here be further remarked on; a fuller discussion would lead us too far afield. However, we are convinced that altruism springs up and grows like the other elements of psychic life, as functional in the largest way to the demands of life in the struggle for existence.

Horror is a distinctive term for altruistic fear. When on a train, I am terrified if I perceive a collision imminent and inevitable, but as a mere spectator walking near the tracks, I am horrified by the prospect of a collision. One may be “in mortal terror,” but not in mortal horror.

Our sense of the feelings of others towards us, whether they be egoistic or altruistic, determines a large class of reflex emotions which are often very subtle. If we perceive that some one is fearing us or fearing for us there is immediate reaction on our part. Feeling response to feeling acts and reacts in a multitude of complex ways, as we cannot but observe when in the company of very “sensitive” people. The “sensitive” one is he whose emotional life is governed by his perception of the feelings of others toward himself, and he becomes wonderfully responsive to the least expressions of emotion toward himself. The delicate responsiveness of women, their intuitions, are merely quick perceptiveness of emotion expression. The fears of such are largely concerned with this dependence on the emotional attitudes of others toward themselves; they fear to incur displeasure, they fear loss of love, etc. Thus psychical phenomena become more and more determined by psychical phenomena as interpreted and considered with reference to the self. Panic is contagious fear, and has originated and been developed as securing mutual safety in societies of animals. However, there is less real fear on occasions of panic than is often supposed, for much of the expression which we read as fear inspired is really merely imitative, and does not signify any real basis of emotion. Moreover, we must note that there is no direct contagion, but the perception of fear in others merely leads us to dimly body forth some fearful events as impending, which representation involves the full phenomenon of fear. There is also a discrimination as to those who shall impart fear; the fear of a child on shipboard will not start a panic, while the fear of a captain would. Convinced that there is something worth fearing, we fear, and make frantic efforts to escape.

We have before mentioned (p. 89) the peculiar fear of fear. The latest and culminating differentiation of fear is awe, and the highest, most refined development of awe is in the feeling for the sublime. The sense of magnitude and mighty potency of injurious agents or agencies in themselves considered, and not as immediately affecting the individual or any individual, is the essential element in awe as a species of fear. This fear is then neither egoistic nor altruistic, but impersonal. We fear neither for ourselves nor others in standing awestruck at the foot of Niagara, but a sense of overwhelming greatness and might stirs a thrill of emotion which is at bottom a sublimation of fear. The view which to a peasant or an animal would give terror, or produce no emotional effect whatever, with very rational and sensitive minds produces awe. Awe does not, as early emotions and fear generally, lead directly to will, it is not a stimulant to action, and thus has not been evolved by the principle of usefulness for action which governs the general course of physiological and psychical evolution. It is evident that with awe and the sense of the sublime emotion has a value and end in itself. In the higher evolution of man we see that the psychic elements evolve no longer in a strict dependency for their value in securing advantage and success in the struggle for existence, but comfortable existence being practically assured, psychic development is pushed on in lines ethical, emotional and intellectual, for no practical end, but for their own intrinsic value. Thus the feeling for the sublime is a purely independent development, which, indeed, is based upon man’s capacity to fear egoistically and altruistically, but is really exercised solely for its own sake. A consciousness which has had no common fear stage, could never arrive at awe. We stand in awe of persons who are totally beyond us in their superiority, who exist in a sphere of power and glory, which transcends even our understanding, and thus awe has a religious as well as æsthetic side.

The chief differentiations then of fear we note as intensive dread, as altruistic horror, as impersonal awe. The chronological order of evolution may be denoted in this order—fright, alarm, terror, dread, horror.

CHAPTER IX
ON DESPAIR

Despair is a phase of painful emotion which is certainly related to fear, yet is very distant from it. Despair has always a fear basis; we can only despair where fear is implied, and what does not excite fear will give no hold for despair. I must first fear a pain before I can despair of escaping it. The prisoner condemned to death must fear death before he will be in despair at the prospect of it. Yet while despair always implies fear, fear may often exist and that in very strong form without despair. The prisoner often displays great fear, but no despair.

There is, in fact, a strong contrast between fear and despair. Fear normally stimulates effort, despair depresses it. Fear is active, despair passive. Deep dejection and lassitude mark despair, while fear is intense agitation and activity. Fear in its original and normal function is stimulant of defensive action, fear as paralytic being secondary or abnormal, but in normal despair there is absolute inertness. Fear, again, in contrast with despair, is direct and transitive. I fear the pain or injury, but my despair is only in relation to it, despair of, in despair, etc. Fear is at the evil itself, it is a direct attitude of mind toward it, through an ideal pre-experiencing, the very representation of any pain as experienceable carrying with it a thrill of fear. But despair concerns itself, not with the pain per se as experienceable, but with the inevitability of the painful. Fear rests upon idea of pain, despair, upon idea of its inevitability. “I despair of escape,” means a recoil of painful emotion at inevitability of painful experience. Sense of complete and permanent inability to attain an end, whether release from pain, or positively, a securing a pleasure, generates commonly this distressful emotion. Despair is not then simple pain at pain, but at the unavertibility of the pain. Despair is then the mind bent down and crushed by the sense of the inevitable and irremediable nature of the pain, positive or negative, it experiences or is to experience. Despair is, indeed, hopelessness, though all hopelessness is not despair. There is no hope in stolidity or in stoicism, psychic modes quite distinct from despair, but which take the place with some natures.

Again, we must note that while fear has its degrees, and may be but partial, despair is always complete collapse. I may fear a little but not despair a little, I may be frightened “just the least bit,” but not despair a little bit. The hostess who is “in despair” because the ice cream has not come, speaks truly, however, for the affair is for her so important and momentous as to be the basis of real despair. That which is the occasion of despair must always be or seem of capital value.

An adjacent and often precedent state to despair is desperation, which is a feeling of the almost inevitable. In the face of heavy odds there is often awakened a painful emotion which we term desperation, and which leads to strong and furious will action, to an intense and general struggle which is often advantageous. An enemy fears to drive his adversary to desperation. In desperation we take one chance in a thousand or in a million; for example, the leader of a forlorn hope. It would be difficult to say whether despair or desperation contains more of pain, but they are obviously quite opposite in their character. To combative temperaments and with pugnacious animals the sense of the seeming inevitable is often stimulative of desperation rather than despair. Such are “game” to the last. A criminal of this type will run amuck rather than submit to his fate in despair. The desperado is defiant to the end. With some whose natures are balanced between reflection and action there are in the face of the inevitable or almost inevitable rapid fluctuations of despair and desperation.

Dismay is another form closely akin to despair. Dismay is the immediate result for feeling of a sudden cognition of great difficulties and pains as imminent. As the transition stage of rapid movement in feeling toward despair, as the sudden falling in temperature from hope, it is really incipient despair. Dismay is essentially temporary, and settles quickly into despair or rises into renewed hope. Though but such a passing mode, it yet has for the moment that sense of self-efficiency annihilated which is so characteristic of despair. Consternation is very intense dismay.

But what now is the real quality and inner nature of despair? what essentially is this strange drooping before inevitable loss, injury and pain? and what is its significance for life? Despair is certainly a very advanced and complex emotion, and we can do no more at present than merely remark on some of its most striking features.

A most noticeable and remarkable quality of despair is its introactive tendency. When the whole strength and vital motive, of a full-grown teleologic psychic life—the dilettante is not capable of despair—is suddenly and completely withdrawn, there results, not indifference nor ennui but a deep disturbance which is active on the minus side of mental life. The complete breaking up of great and absorbing hopes and of the free objective activity flowing from them brings will tension down, not simply to nil, but gives it a spring back into the negative region beyond the line of mere quiescence and indifferentism. Despair is a revulsive process by which the whole mind is broken up, just as a propeller wheel running at high speed out of water or an engine working at high pressure when disconnected from its shafting, tend to wrench and shatter themselves. Desire is not really extinct, but latent; though smothered it burns inward. This is that peculiar cankering, corroding quality, which is always so marked in despair. Will, not self-shattered, but forcibly pent by external circumstances, gives a sullen restlessness to the mental life now turned in upon itself. Hence the capacity for despair will be directly as the co-ordinate capacity for action and reflection in any individual, and as such co-ordination marks the highest level of conscious life, despair is certainly a phenomenon of exceptionally complex and advanced consciousness.

Again, we note that despair is intensely and oppressively a pain state, but the dull despair pain is distinct from racking fear pain. What now is the nature of despair pain, and what the reason for its peculiar quality? Here is not as in fear a feeling pain at pain, but at the idea of its inevitability and completely destructive power. The actual pain foreseen may seem bearable and excite little feeling, but it is the total loss of personal success, the complete thwarting of self-realization, that moves the mind to despair, that causes that sickening, dull, emotional pain which we term despair. Thus despair is eminently a disease of self-hood, an egoistic distemper, the strong and large individuality being peculiarly subject to it. However, the general problem of despair pain is practically the same as of the origin and nature of fear pain, which has already been discussed. Whether any mere representation induces pain, and how it does so, is certainly one of the most difficult problems of emotional psychology. We have in a previous chapter sought to indicate in a general way that purely subjective or mental pain which is not in any wise revival of sensation or objective does really exist. Also since pain per se is always simple and identical, the differentiation of pains as seemingly quite different in kind, as fear pain, despair pain, etc., is really due to sensation, will, and other elements which closely adhere to pain and give it a certain local colouring. The whole emotion is a complex of various factors which are closely knit into a single state which to common observation seems simple, but which is really constituted in its ensemble by the total specific forces of many elements. In psychics, as in physics, we know that common sense analysis of phenomena must be at fault, and that one who says “I certainly have an entirely different pain when I fear and when I despair,” is as much in the wrong as he who maintains essential diversities in material substance, or radical distinctions of species in the organic world. So we must believe that the peculiar quality of the pain in despair exists, not in the pain itself, but is really the colouring result from various coincident sensations and ideas. The lowering of the mental tone far below the zero point is greatly accentuated by refluent waves of organic sensation set up from the physical basis of the psychic disturbance.

How, we may now ask, did despair ever evolve and become a well-defined psychic form? in what way in the course of natural selection could such an apparently disadvantageous variation have arisen and been developed? The serviceability of fear is plain to every one, but of what possible value could despair be in the struggle of life? The one who gives up in despair is but very rarely doing the best thing. If we cannot look to the general principle of evolution, serviceability, how can we account for the appearance and growth of such a phase as despair, except as abnormal variation, a disease, profitable to the enemies of the individual, and so developed by and for external organisms. As there is an abnormal pathological variation of fear, which we have previously noticed, and which is forced in its development by enemies who profit by it, so despair is a psychic disease, entirely hurtful to the individual, and, so far, only advantageous for its enemies. Despair is, without doubt, one of those altruistic variations which serve, not the individual, but some antagonist in the struggle of existence. To bring one to despair is to make him entirely helpless and wholly at our mercy for our own ends. The possibility that active-reflective natures may prey upon themselves is thus stimulated into an actual phenomenon whose growth is continually fostered by those whose advantage it is to reduce the individual to a helpless condition. Despair is hardly an hypertrophy or atrophy of any normal tendency, it is rather a pathological genus by itself. The capacity for despair being inherent in the general formation of mind as subject to collapse, it arose solely in response to the needs of organisms warring upon the organism afflicted. The whole field of physical and psychical altruistic variation under the general law of natural selection, decadent and self-injurious characteristics being stimulated and maintained in a kind of artificial selection, is an interesting but unexplored field, attention so far having been turned to the individually advantageous as determining element in evolution.

Despair is a disease of advanced and mature psychic life. Children are, in general, incapable of despair. It implies a well-developed sense of self and a general experience of the world. High and strong emotional natures, but rather weak-willed and narrow of intelligence, are predisposed to it. Occasions which would lead to despair will with lower natures be unnoticed or lead merely to stolidity; while with the highest natures, there comes heroic endeavour and wide searching for means and methods.

CHAPTER X
ANGER

In studying any state of consciousness we first inquire what constitutes its dominant factor; if this is sense of object, we call it a cognition; if effortful action, it is a volition; if the marked feature is pleasure-pain, we term it a feeling. Finding that the consciousness is a feeling, we would next inquire whether the pleasure-pain is mainly determined in its colouring by direct presentation, and so is a sensation, or whether this dominant colouring comes indirectly through representation, and is thus what we term an emotion. For example, the distinction between “I feel a pain in my shoulder,” and “I feel pained at your conduct” illustrates the most radical division of feeling. If emotion is founded on an appreciation of the experienceable, which has developed under natural selection, we must look upon the emotional power in general and upon the various emotions in particular as merely advantageous psychoses which are as clearly determined by general evolutionary laws as the merely physical organs like heart, lungs, wings, horns, etc. It is clearly desirable that the organism should look before, should anticipate experience and so direct its way; but bare anticipation has no value in itself unless it powerfully stimulates will through emotion. All conscious life above the most primitive is eminently and increasingly anticipatory, and so becomes more and more infused with emotional powers. Among the earliest developed of these in the struggle for existence are fear and anger. The fear group, embracing large numbers of allied forms, simple and complex, has been discussed in a general way in the preceding pages, and we now come to some consideration of the correlative anger group.

The rationale of the evolution of anger is not far to seek. We have seen that fear is the spring of defensive action, and it is obvious that anger is the stimulant to offensive action. Fear is regressive, anger aggressive. Fear is contractile, anger expansive. Fear is the emotion of the pursued, of the prey; anger the emotion of the pursuer, of the predacious. Emotion in the service of life evidently has two great psychic ramifications from this point, and the whole world of emotion-beings, which compose the greater mass of organisms, is hence divided in two great divisions, a fear class and an anger class. Likewise in relation to opposing natural forces as to neighbouring competing and destroying organisms, the same distinction is to be made according as the animal either combats or flees. Shyness or fierceness, timidity or irascibility, these are characters which divide the animate world into two grand antagonistic groups. Zoology has recognised this psychic differentiation as a marked and essential feature in its nomenclature, thus lepus timidus. In fact, the most important part of evolution is the psychical; in this, indeed, lies the whole significance and value of the organism. The attainment of more and more advantageous psychic qualities is the main trend of evolution, for psychic power as distinct from main force, like that of the elements, is far and away of the most value in the struggle for existence, and ultimately, as in man, it achieves the subduing all lower powers, natural, vegetable and brute, to its own ends. It is psychical quality, moreover, which determines physical, and not vice versâ. Thus it is not the possession of claws, fangs, etc., that makes an animal fierce, but it is fierceness which develops and maintains these weapons of offence. Thus it is, though thus far practically overlooked by scientists, that psychic development, especially on the emotional side, is of the utmost importance as the prime factor and motive in organic processes. The central core of life is emotional capacity, and this in its evolution determines the whole external morphological trend of evolution of organisms which is so closely followed by the science of to-day. But the science of the future is comparative psychology, which, when once placed on a secure basis of interpretation, will determine the real and inner law of evolution as a psychic movement incarnating itself in a succession of animate forms. But a sure method of knowing a psychic fact as such when it occurs, and what, how, and why it is, is yet to be discovered and applied, and extra-human and even extra-ego consciousness is a field, so far, for little else than hypothesis. If this remark be turned against us, we say that our work is mainly a deductive interpretation of the course of psychic evolution from the general standpoint of natural selection, reinforced and illustrated by introspective investigation, and merely using the most obvious facts of comparative psychology in a very general and provisional way. We do not profess to show where, how, and when mind originated, or what particular powers any certain organisms possess, but we do endeavour to show how the principle of utility may be made a key to the study of a very perplexing region of mental life—the emotions. We proffer then merely a very general sketch of the history of emotion as a life factor, hoping that it may, at least in its general scope, be of service to future explorers. In taking up this subject of anger we do then thus reiterate the position we occupy and the method we follow.

Anger like fear certainly originated at some critical point in some individuals life as an advantageous variation of essential value. A vital issue at some early point in the history of life determined the genesis of this new psychic mode and function as a stimulant of aggressive will action. Very likely it was in competition of organisms for food that some favoured individual first attained the power of getting mad and violently attacking its fellows, and so obtaining sustenance. However this may be, certain it is that a direct attack is often more self-conservative than attempts at escape when injury threatens; it is a greater advantage to destroy pain-giver than to shun it. Fear enables organisms to avoid loss, but it does not accomplish positive gain, as anger does through overcoming hindrance. Anger is often also more economical for the forces of the organism, and thus, in general, predacious animals are longer-lived than even those of their prey who may attain a full length of life. Even in the face of great odds a direct attack is often more serviceable than attempt at escape. Anger is certainly the primitive motive force of all offensive action, though of course we cannot say that the animal got mad because it saw the serviceability. Psychic evolution, at least as far as new powers are concerned, never comes by teleologic foresight, and, indeed, cannot by the nature of the case. The animal did not definitely set out to get angry because it foresaw the value, yet in the earliest angers there must have been effort, a certain nisus which marked the new form as a real attainment, a marked achievement. That the provoking occasion gives rise now to anger inevitably and naturally, that anger comes upon us and overcomes us is true enough, but in its earliest phases anger must have been, like other just evolving factors, supported only by powerful will effort. The oftener the early psychism got mad, the easier it got mad. Facility came only by practice, and a large variety of occasions, besides the simple critical and original one, were gradually utilized by the anger faculty. But in its original form and occasion anger was, no doubt, akin to that we see when an extremely timid animal at the last extremity will turn in anger and fiercely fight for its life. Such an attempt, sometimes successful, marks an origin of a new mode of conscious emotion which may never return to the individual again during all its future life for lack of occasion. If often returning and often improved, a definite new habit of emotion is established, and from being a fearful animal it may at length become dominantly irascible, and so belong to a totally distinct psychic genus.

By the evolution of anger then, as in contradistinction to fear, two grand divisions of animate existence were set apart, two great psychical orders as fundamentally distinct and important for evolutionary psychics, as invertebrate and vertebrate for biology. The rise of the back-boned animal is not more important for physiological morphology than the evolution of anger for psychical morphology, and, indeed, as we have before remarked, the psychical growth is ever the broadest and deepest fact in evolution. By the acquirement and predominance of the anger stimulus certain animals became differentiated as a distinct class from their fearful neighbours, and they then by this new impulse gradually attained instruments of offence, and also by increase of size became physically distinct forms. Henceforth the animate world becomes divided in a more and more marked way into pursuers and pursued. By mutual interaction fear is increased on one side as anger increases on the other, and the division into timid and fierce, predacious and prey, becomes more and more established and marked.

We take it then that it was a most momentous day in the progress of mind when anger was first achieved, and some individual actually got mad. If the exact date and the particular individual were ascertainable a memorial day set apart for all time would not be too great an honour. In the struggle of existence, other things being equal, the most irascible is the most successful, faring the best, securing the best mate, and having the best and most numerous progeny. Susceptibility to anger becomes a necessity to a large class of organisms, and those who will not get angry and fight for their interests are surely trampled on or pushed aside to become starveling or outcast.

Is now this primitive anger an absolutely new power, a de novo evolution, or is it possible to study its rise as a gradual differentiation from some other factor? Must we not view psychical evolution like all evolution as coming under the law of continuity? How then explain the sudden rise of apparently new and distinct forms like anger or fear? Anger as a response to the demands of life seems from the very first to be as distinctly and peculiarly anger as at any time in its development. The peculiar quality which makes anger anger, does not seem to appear as a gradual differentiation from other elements as slowly emerging from previous modes, but we can only judge that it bursts suddenly upon the field as a new and unique creation, which does not find its explanation in pre-existent forms and cannot be traced as a gradual evolution from them. On the other hand, while it does not at first sight seem possible to regard anger as being from the first other than a radically new power and activity determined, indeed, by the struggle for existence, but wholly unexplained in its essence and formation as a consciousness related to and differentiated from other consciousnesses, yet we must acknowledge our profound ignorance of the real morphology of mind and what is the real nature of mental differentiation. Here the problem is altogether more difficult than in biology, where the appearance of new forms like wings can be readily traced as slow modifications of previous members, the physical possibility and rationale of which is easily seen to be inherent in the physical constitution of the body and its circumambient matter, the air. However, in the present state of our psychical knowledge it is quite impossible to attain any similarly clear conception as to the formation of new psychical forms. We may see why they should be called into being by the necessities of animate life, we can perceive their functional importance from the first, but to trace their morphological development as gradually assuming their peculiar qualities as modifications of already existing activities, and as inherently possible in the psychical constitution of things, this is clearly beyond us at present. We can conceive that the earliest anger was weak and rather ineffective as compared with the fully developed anger of later life, but we cannot see that it was any the less anger, any the less purely and wholly sui generis than the very latest and strongest form. Has it ever in its earlier stages that hybrid and mixed character which marks it as a modification of existent factors? It is certainly not a modified fear, to which it is, indeed, a polar opposite.

But we may perhaps regard anger, and fear as well, as modified from previous general emotion. We may, indeed, consider it likely that some general emotional phase preceded the special emotions, just as a general indefinite pain and pleasure preceded definite pains and pleasures. It may be considered as probable that emotion first appeared as a purely undifferentiated disturbance sequent on sense of the experienceable pain, this general emotion being neither fear nor anger, but the basis from which both develop. The psychic agitation we term emotional very likely began in a purely general form, yet it is hard to understand how peculiar forms develop therefrom. We are too far from such inchoate experience to readily come to any appreciation of its method or mode. We may be disturbed as to something imminent and know not whether to fear or be angry, but this in general means only a rapid alternation of fear and anger according as the mind runs back and forth between fear and anger-provoking elements. It is unlikely that we can trace in any such a purely undifferentiated emotion.

At the best we but throw the difficulty farther back, for emotion per se is then the de novo form to which the principle of continuity does not seem to apply. If anger is a traceable modification of some more general emotion as combined with definite representation and volition modes, yet how the peculiar anger quality is achieved is still unexplained. On the whole it seems simplest and truest to assume the first impulse of anger as a perfectly new and diverse wave of emotion suddenly generated in answer to some extreme urgency in the struggle of existence.

The analogy of organic and psychic evolution may be pressed to a certain extent. It is plainly possible to set in order an evolutionary series of light—sensing organs, eyes—from most elementary to most complex, and it is quite as possible, though yet to be done, to set forth in similar genetic order a series of psychic states as offence-sense, i.e., angers, in their increasing differentiation. But previous to any eye, to local visualization, there is a period of common sensation when an absolutely simple organism is in every part equally responsive to light; in a crude way the whole organism reacts to light, from which stage by traceable specialization the eye as a light-sensing organ is gradually developed. Here analogy would seem to fail, unless we consider it to be the stage when any psychosis, e.g., anger, requires the whole consciousness capacity, mind being merely a capacity for the recurrent but isolated single-activities. Mind certainly but slowly grows into that sum of organic coincident interdependent yet distinct consciousnesses which we commonly think of under the term, mind. Anger in its very earliest and lowest form is no doubt an absorbing naïve isolated wave, as common to mind as a whole, that is, as making up the whole of mind for the time being, is perhaps in its measure an analogy to common sensation. Anger may then be but a common emotion, answering in a certain aspect to light-sense, sound-sense, etc., as purely common sensations. But we must remark that general sensation is not to be confounded with common sensation, or general emotion with common emotion. Common sensations are, indeed, usually very general in form, and a sensation per se, a purely general sensation, is probably very rarely anything else, yet when we close the eyes and direct them toward the sun, the general sensation of light we receive—very like the original primitive common sensation—is general, yet by a special organ. The word common refers, not to the special nature of the function itself, but the fact that the function, whether special or general, is performed indifferently, or practically so, by the common whole. A sensation of coloured light is more special than a mere sensation of light, and this than mere general sensation of force, but all may be accomplished either by common sensation or special sensation. General emotion may similarly be either common or in organic co-activity. There was certainly a time when consciousness existed which was not and could not be anger or fear or even an emotion per se. Pre-emotional and pre-representative consciousness was so absolutely primitive, general, and common, that psychology as a necessarily automorphic science will be very long in coming to any understanding of this field, but yet we must set it off as something which must always receive some consideration. Anger is not a property of all consciousness by the nature of consciousness itself, but is merely a possible mode dependent on circumstances for its development at a certain psychic stage.

What now is the inner nature and what the constituent elements of the anger state? Comparatively few reflect upon their emotions save from an ethical standpoint, and very few indeed attempt any analysis of them. To determine the process and exact psychical constituents of getting mad and being mad, may seem to many a quite useless and foolish introspective endeavour. If a person is angry, he is angry, and that is all there is of it, will be the general verdict of common sense. You can dissect flowers into their parts, you can analyse rocks and soils, but any emotion such as anger is wholly unanalyzable. No one can know what it is to be mad until he has once been mad, and, thereafter, he can only reflect upon it as a peculiar excitement, a powerful agitation, whose occasions and results may be fully traced, but which in itself is sui generis and irresolvable. The form of consciousness we know as being angry, is really a simple wave of emotion which stands by itself as an elementary and ultimate form.

Suppose we acknowledge these remarks as true, we may yet maintain that anger, like all emotions, is a highly complex state of manifold factors whose sum total, whose grand resultant, is a seemingly simple and peculiar status. Why should one arrangement of atoms produce a peculiar perfume, another a peculiar stench? Anger may likewise be merely an unexplainable ensemble of early ascertainable elements.

Certain it is, in the first place, that sense of object is necessary to anger. One cannot be mad without being mad at something. The attitude of mind is objective, and even rage in its blindest moment preserves this attitude. Blind with rage, means no more than that various definite qualities of the object are lost in the intense emotional reaction at pain-giver. At its height, anger preserves, indeed, only the barest apprehension of object; but this is intense and overpowering in connection with the sense of it as infringing and injuring. In the transports of rage and fury, the movements are wild and reckless enough, but always antagonistic, implying outward destructive activity. Anger is the fixation of the mind upon some object in its quality of personal hurtfulness, and is revulsion, not from it, as fear, but against it. With early psychisms, all perceptions of objects end in either anger or fear, and a large part of early education consists in learning what objects to be fearful of, and what to be angry at. The alertness of wild animals is determined mainly by either nascent fear or anger. When a dog is suddenly wakened from sleep he generally shows either fear or anger. This is merely an illustration of how the dimmest sense of object immediately connects itself with emotion as primitive and fundamental tendency. The organism perceives the object, and representing its imminent hurtfulness, feels fear and dashes away from it, or feels anger and dashes against it. These are the two simplest possible reactions with sense of the experienceable injurious. In fear there is elimination of oneself from the injury, and in anger the elimination of the injury from oneself. With later anger and fear these processes of elimination themselves become matters of representation, and make a large part in highly-developed forms.

A knowledge which very generally enters into anger is the comparative estimate of power. A cat scratches us, we are angry; a lion threatens us, we are afraid. The progress of the lower psychic life is largely in learning what is best to fear and what should excite anger. That which at first angers will often, when better understood, produce fear, and vice versâ. Wild animals at first often show merely anger when molested by man, but soon manifest fear as they learn to appreciate his superior power. The African elephant learns to distinguish between the savage with his spear, and the white hunter with his rifle, and is merely irritated or angry with the one, while he manifests genuine fear of the other. The young of animals and of man continually show irrelevant fear and anger. They are generally either over fearful or over irritable. Our own feelings are powerfully modified by varying estimates of opposing force and injury. If, in passing through a dark street, I am tripped by what I take to be a child’s snare, I am angered, but upon noticing that it is a fuse to a dynamite bomb, I am thrown into intense fear. In general, any sensation, as of sound or light, in its lower grades of intensity produces anger, in higher occasions fear. As a rule when reactions induced by either fear or anger are uniformly unsuccessful, natural selection favours the development of the other.

While the comparative estimate of opposing force with one’s own is general ingredient in anger, anger being fear-limited, it is not, as Mercier would indicate (Mind, ix., p. 346), a constant element in anger. We often see cases of anger, and have perhaps, ourselves, experienced anger which is totally unrelated to a sense of power. Some animals seem at times utterly fearless and utterly unaware of the tremendous crushing force they angrily oppose. It is, moreover, altogether probable that anger and fear originated and received a certain measure of development before any capacity of measuring comparative force of antagonist arose in mind. However, the discrimination between overwhelming and slight force is certainly tolerably early, and is obviously a very necessary factor in self-conservative action. Yet it is very unlikely that this was an element in primitive fear or anger, which must have been no more than a simple emotional reaction to perceived injury without any reference to whether pain-giver is more or less strong than pain-receiver. The earliest fears and angers of infants seem to be quite devoid of any guidance from sense of powerlessness or power, but merely direct, unthinking reactions.

A marked and constant element in anger is hostility. This is the aggressive fighting attitude of will which is exercised toward and against the perceived pain-giving object. Anger can never subsist without this volition element, and it always appears as direct simple reaction to anger-provoking object. Anger always exhibits itself as hostility, openly and freely in lower life, and in higher life, which is often disingenuous, the hostility as real psychic act remains, though somewhat concealed in physical manifestation as long as angry mood exists. The will tendency is always toward the violent removing and destroying of the offending object. However, naïve primitive anger does not include in its hostility giving pain for pain received, making the object suffer in turn, which is, indeed, far removed from the capacity of primitive mind to conceive. Anger in its earliest form does, of course, inflict pain where its object is pain-susceptible; but this, it may confidently be said, cannot lie in the intent of the pain-inflicter. The simple original ebullitions of anger do not include intent in any form. Volition is powerfully and directly incited by the emotion without the intervention of any idea. The only representation in the simplest anger is the representation of pain experience impending which occasions the excitement, which then directly and violently starts will-activity; but the representations of destructiveness and pain-infliction as ends become guiding ideas only in the slow evolution of anger toward more intelligent forms.

Pain is certainly a prominent element in anger. This pain is the emotional pain, the pain at pain, whose nature and origin we have commented on in the chapter on fear. The mere representation of pain to be starts a violent pain quite distinct from the fear-pain, yet like it, pre-eminently central and subjective. Precedent, however, to both fear and anger-pain, is the simple pain which immediately arises on representation of pain, the prospect of pain being immediately and peculiarly painful in itself. This commonly continues throughout, and gives a dominant pain tone. But there immediately succeeds a rush of either fear or anger emotion, each intensely painful in opposite ways. The pain which results from the anger, which is by the anger occasioned in me, is again distinct from the pain in and of the anger. Anger is itself a state of pain. In its earliest forms, as rarely and with difficulty attained, there is still another pain connected with anger, the pain of exertion and stress. But all the pain factors, as more or less continuous, make anger, as emotion in general, a complex pain state. Thus, when angered by a man shaking his fist in my face, we trace first a purely subjective pain at prospect of pain, then a rush of aggressive emotion which embodies in it a pain of its own, then a pain which reacts from the peculiar tension of the anger state. Of course, in our stage of evolution, anger has become such an inwrought factor that it arises spontaneously, it overtakes and overcomes us, not we reaching it; and so the stress or labour pain is absent. It is never or very rarely an effort for us to get angry, but it must have been for our very remote psychical ancestors.

While it may be said with truth that some people are never so happy as when mad, yet we must remember this does not alter the fact that anger is radically a pain state. There may be a pleasure from anger excitement, and from successful anger; there may be a pleasure in the mere exercise of aggressive power; but the happiness meant is mostly the excitement pleasure plus the delight which always comes from freely following out one’s nature. Especially when the outflow of natural force in an irascible man has been pent up and restrained for some time, a fit of anger is altogether a delightful experience, the pleasure of relief in a habitual function. Thus an occasional fight is necessary to the pugnacious amongst both animals and men; it is an inbred function and tendency which must work itself out, or render the being as miserable as a rodent kept from gnawing. But all this does not interfere with the analysis of anger as fundamentally painful. Happiness is a very late evolution, and, as the reaction from freely working out one’s strongest tendency, it is unfelt by early minds, which only gradually attain inwrought tendencies and so the capacity for being happy or unhappy. To witness a fight is likewise to a large class of minds a supreme felicity. This is largely the pleasure which comes at second hand from representation of participancy. And so, to have a fight described, or to read about it even, is a source of considerable representative pleasure to many, a spurious and reflected anger, and an ideal fighting in the fray. However, all this leads far away from primitive emotion, which is now our main concern.

We may grant then that sense of the object giving pain, sense of comparative power, hostility, and pains of various kinds, are usual elements in anger; yet it is evident that anger is explained by no one or all of them. It is not a mere aggregation and mixture of states, it is essentially a compound which has in some unexplained way a peculiar quality which is not in any of its constituent elements. When I am angry, there occurs a phenomenon which, while based on and inclusive of these factors, is yet peculiar in itself. The flush of anger, the wave of emotion, the tempest of passion, bases itself on and includes cognition, hostility, and pain; but it is more—it is a deep psychic disturbance of a peculiar and undefinable kind which we recognise when we have it, but which we cannot analyse. We express the nature of anger metaphorically, indeed, when we speak of an angry man being “hot,” “boiling with rage,” etc., as opposed to being chilled and frozen stiff by fear. The being angry is obviously a kind of being pained at pain quite opposite to that of fear. It is also true that I may see threatening injury, I may be pained, I may combat, but not be angry. There are other and higher motives which may bring about the violent will offensive activity so often required in the struggle of life; but we may take it that anger is the most primitive, and throughout the whole range of psychism the most common offensive motive, and so of the utmost importance as a life factor.

Which shall we regard as the more primitive, anger or fear? Were animals at first universally timid, and subsequently acquired anger as an advantageous variation, or was anger the first, and fear the complementary and later evolution, or may we suppose that they developed in strict correlation? The earliest manifestations of emotion with some animals, and with some human infants, seem to be anger. Everything perceived to be painful irritates and makes them mad, and they are quite fearless in the presence of overwhelming danger. These but slowly learn to fear; by hard experience they learn the hurtfulness and inutility of combatting in many cases, and occasions which would once make them mad now cause them to fear. On the other hand, we observe many of the very young who seem to be universally fearful, and but slowly acquire “spunk” and spirit. Mental embryology thus, at least with our present very imperfect knowledge, is quite indecisive on the question. If fear and anger were wholly determined by relation of predacious and prey, then we might suppose correlated simultaneous origin; but we know that obstacles and injuries, not from competitors, but from elements, forces, and objects of nature, were the first environment and the first field for struggle. Organism began as a weak thing planted amongst manifold opposing forces, where fear was quite the most salutary emotion and anger useless. If, as we must deem probable, mental function in general and emotion in particular reaches back toward primitive organism, it is likely, on merely general grounds, that fear is the more ancient and original emotion, though anger was closely subsequent. The general conditions of life at the first would demand the development of fear more imperatively than anger. Certainly, however, both emotions are sufficiently primitive, as is shown by their being so ingrained and dominant forces in the whole range of lower psychic life.

All higher animals, moreover, are peculiarly sensitive to and observant of signs of anger and fear. Rarey, a most excellent judge, made it an axiom of his method that horses are extremely acute in detecting either fear or anger in those who deal with them, and this is also noticeably true of animals in general. These are also the emotional attitudes which are earliest interpreted by children. Now what is soonest, easiest and surest interpreted by psychisms above the lowest may be taken to be fundamentally primitive and such are fear and anger. To discover with readiness and certainty the emotional states of organisms about them, because these states are the motives of very important activities, is clearly an advantage early gained in the struggle of existence. It means preparedness, and there is a nascent anger to break forth against the fearful, or fear or counter-anger prepared against the fear discerned or suspected. The inter-related activity of these two emotions is the chiefest and most interesting spectacle we see in all lower psychic phases.

But we must notice now a form which seems on the whole to belong to the anger group, and that is hate. Hate often precedes and succeeds anger, and the object of anger is peculiarly apt to be the object of hate. The man whom we hate very easily angers us, and he who provokes us is one whom we are apt to hate. Yet a person may be very provoking, even exasperating, and not be hateful, and vice versâ for hate. It is obvious then that while the object of anger and hate is apt to be the same, yet it is viewed from very different standpoints, and the emotion reactions are somehow very different. “I hate him,” and “I am angry at him,”—these expressions denote very distinct emotions. While anger and hate are both aggressive emotion reactions against the pain-giver, yet in their nature they are essentially diverse. In general we hate him who deliberately and constantly provokes us, who establishes himself as a deliberate enemy. It is harmful, opposed intent that particularly stimulates hate. But anger is most generally a sudden flash of feeling leading to violent repulsive effort against pain-giver, but without any insight into intent. The immediacy of reaction is accomplished through anger; but hate, having more of insight and foresight, is more slowly generated, and is not so directly and promptly active. I may be angry at one who casually pinches me in sport, but I will hate him who continually pinches me in spite. I may be angry at the child who in its childish play often interrupts my studies, but I do not hate it; this I reserve for the malicious boys who continually put tick-tacks on my windows. And so also inanimate things often arouse anger; but we hate only the animate, and then mainly when we discern deliberate, purposed offence. To be sure we often hear some such expression as, “I hate the very sight of that house”; but here the term hate denotes loathing, and is only a little less flagrant misuse than when I say “I hate ham, but love beefsteak.”

Hate, then, marks in a very noticeable way the growth of psychic responsiveness. A prevision of psychic attitude of others, especially the emotional and volitional, is of the utmost service as helping to and preparing for an appropriate response. Thus we may believe that quite early in mental evolution there came an appreciation and interpretation of the psychic modes of others as affecting the interests of the individual. We may judge that this is probable by the very apparent difference of reaction of even certain of the lower animals in the presence of threatening dangers from common material things, and from animate beings capable of being not merely crushed or pushed away, but intimidated and frightened away. Young children learn quickly to distinguish between mere physical events and psychic expressions, and to feel and to act toward the psychic in the peculiar manner which will best serve them. Thus it becomes of very definite value to excite fear in enemies, but even a low animal learns speedily that it cannot terrify a large stone which prevents access to food. Now fear and anger obviously do not specially belong to the rather advanced class of emotions which are always psychically responsive, for, in earliest phases at least, both fear and anger may be taken to have no reference to the psychic quality of the object, but only to the physical quality as painful and injurious. However, later fear and anger become cognizant of the psychic attitude and responsive thereto; but it may be said that hate from the first is a psychic responsive, it is an answer to the psychic attitude of others as interpreted by the individual as turned towards itself. Hate is always against evil intent; anger and fear may be. Hate and anger are both intensified by hate and anger in the object—though this may often occasion fear—but fear, on the contrary, is greatly weakened, and sometimes turned into hate or anger, by perceiving its object as fearing it. I naturally hate those and am angered with those whom I perceive as having the same passions against me; but he whom I see fearing me does not thereby inspire my fear for him, but tends in quite the contrary direction. Yet mutual fear in equally matched opponents is consistent with mutual anger and hate. Fear, with those who are capable of inflicting about equal losses on each other, acts as a check upon anger and hate, and gives caution and wariness to passion itself.

The object of hate then differs from that of anger and fear, as being invariably a psychic quality in another as injurious to one’s own interests. Injuriousness per se does not excite hate as it may anger and fear. Animals, indeed, often seem to hate that which has no psychic attitude toward them, and may be wholly incapable of it; but this is error of judgment, just as we ourselves often find ourselves wrong in hating where we supposed there was evil feeling toward us, but where we now see there is none. Hate disappears the moment we discover our mistake of interpretation.

While hate often views its object very largely from the retrospective side, as opposed to fear and anger, which are generally prospective, yet hate originally must have applied to the present or latent potency of the object for harm, for only in this wise does it reach self-conservative value. In early psychic life there is no time or place for purely retrospective emotion like revenge and resentment. Hate is not essentially a paying back for the past offence, but a will-inciting emotion of immediate, or imminently prospective value. In fact, though we say, “he has done me injury and I hate him for it,” yet we do not hate the dead injurer or the one so crippled as to be entirely powerless against us. Certainly there is no value for our interests in injuring the one who is past injuring us, and from the self-conservative point of view to exercise ourselves in hate or anger in such a case is to waste energy. Feeling for what has been done against us, purely as such, is plainly sheer waste of force. The past is irretrievable, and emotion about it is valuable for life only so far as the past implies the future. Thus it is that hate, arising because of self-conservative value, and developing under natural selection, never becomes wholly retrospective.

Hate then is at first much the same in its elements as anger. It is always objective. Hate is always of something, though extreme passion dulls perception, yet at its normal tension hate, like other emotions, is incentive to beneficial cognition. We are closely observant of those we hate. Beside sense of object, there is the will-stirring, the hostility, which is prominent in anger, though here more controlled and not so impetuous and naïve. Hate thus often allies itself with fear, but anger is very rarely coincident with it, though there may be rapid alternations. There is also a hate pain which is a parallel complex to the anger pain already analysed. We might term hate a distilled anger, and yet this signifies little, for the innermost emotion seems very distinct. Like fear and anger, hate seems a genus by itself, and in its essential feature as emotion-reaction, quite beyond scientific analysis, which can point out its conditions, but not account for their total value or for the peculiar quality of hate disturbance by which hate is hate. Hate can be appreciated only by realization, but no matter how long we reflect upon and try to catch its exact nature in some definite formula, the essence of hate always eludes, and presents itself as only a bare simple psychosis wholly indefinable and inexplicable in its essential nature.

But if we turn now to the origin and development of hate, shall we arrive at anything more satisfactory? Is hate a modified anger, or is it from the first a wholly distinct emotion and not slowly differentiated from any preceding psychosis? Hate evidently belongs with anger as aggressive emotional reaction, but it is very hard to see how it could originate by any slow growth, and it seems easier and simpler to regard it as being a unique response to some very pressing demand in the struggle of existence.

The whole subject of mental differentiation needs clarifying. Are we to consider mind merely as a sum of many distinct modes each of which has, in the course of evolution, appeared suddenly in answer to the demands of life at a critical period, and is faint, indeed, yet from the first having a distinct and peculiar quality by which it suitably stimulates will, and that the sole growth of these diverse forms has been in intensity and by various associations with other states? or are we to consider that mind was originally a very general vague state, which, by a continuous and traceable differentiation, has slowly developed into many different modes? Certainly the latter seems the more rational. To conceive that there are no essential and radical subdivisions in mind, that not even knowing, feeling, and willing, are fundamentally primitive, but each, and each form of each, but modifications of precedent modes, this is a theory which is enticing in its simplicity and in its analogy to physical evolution from a single underlying material element. But when we come to particular investigations, as this of the origin and development of hate, we cannot well discover any modes intermediate between it and say, anger, which are the links in a continuous evolution, but for aught we can see or conceive, hate is as much hate the first time it appears as at any subsequent time. The links in the evolution of mind from phase to phase are all missing, and how are we to supply them? Of necessity as subjective facts they must first be realized, before they can be known, but how can this be done by a consciousness which has long outgrown them? We cannot discover these fossil and extinct forms objectively, as the paleontologist discovers extinct species, but in some way we must re-enact and re-experience them in our own consciousness before we can know anything about them. If every mind embryologically passes through the several stages of its general evolution in the race, still the strange intermediate forms which might then have existed are beyond the recall of the reflective stage, when we first demand to know the history of mind. And when we appeal to comparative psychology we are equally in the dark, for we must judge animals by ourselves, we can interpret their consciousness only by our own, and they may have very rude and peculiar forms which are unknown and unknowable by us. Thus the limitations and difficulties of subjective research are especially brought up to us in evolutionary study which thus seems wholly confined to a priori speculation. While we can conceive it likely that hate was suddenly brought into full being by the demands of life, yet it is hardly a rational view of emotion to regard it as a per saltum series of distinct psychical species called successively into being by the exigencies of existence, which indeed, is a view almost as ultra-scientific as that which regards all mental modes as direct endowments from Deity.

But though on general scientific analogy we are led to believe in fossil mental forms, in missing psychic links now extinct as regards our own consciousness, but which were the germs of our present distinct emotions, perceptions, etc., how are we to discover and investigate them? Can we work our own consciousness back through the multitudinous stages of its past evolution, through myriads of human and pre-human forms to the confused, primal, undifferentiated psychoses?

Certainly the forms which lead up to such an emotion as hate and from which it is gradually evolved must be realized, must be actually felt in some measure before they can be understood and analyzed. Here then seems a great barrier to introspective evolutionary psychology, perhaps insuperable, for how can mind retrace itself, involute itself, in the interests of science? Mind is fundamentally action, motive-feeling, which, in connection with cognitive forms gradually achieved, becomes from mere pure pleasure-pain a very complex manifold. We feel many of these forms in our own experience, and we can say of some that they are the higher, of others that they are the lower and more primitive. Thus fear, anger, and hate are generally regarded as low action-motives as compared with love of truth or justice. But while we distinguish in our own consciousness and by analogy in the consciousness of others a considerable variety of psychic forms, they are, so far as we are able to see—and we have given some special attention to this in discussing fear and other emotions—invariably distinct, and each has its own peculiar quality, and we do not find, and we should not expect to find, the intermediate forms any more than the anatomist would expect to find in man a radial starfish structure. The hazy, indefinite phases which mark evolving consciousness into new forms have been long done away with for such emotions as hate, and it would seem an impossible task to ever bring them back. When we let consciousness lapse of its own regressive tendency—and undirected consciousness tends always to revert to wild states—we fall down through a series, but it is by steps, and no gradual descent, that is, defined mental forms succeed each other, with no transitional phases which are both as differentiating into either. We have mixed states, indeed, but these have no evolutionary value in this line, being merely coincident distinct psychoses, and not an intermediate differentiating mode. The psychoses which we call lower and which we naturally fall into, were really a higher level once for some remote ancestors, and it was only by occasional great efforts that fear, anger, hate, etc., were reached, by just such efforts as now are required by many a worldling who would be religious and would attain a feeling for holiness, or that of a Philistine, ambitious of reaching æsthetic feeling, who endeavours to appreciate the refined, elaborate power in a poem by Rossetti, or the simple human grandeur in a painting by Millet. In some forms we know what it is to try to feel, to have dim and vague stirring of æsthetic emotion, and to reach new levels in emotion generally, and we know the stages of differentiation and the severe nisus of the earlier realizations. On the nisus side of our psychic life there is abundant opportunity for every one to observe the process of mental differentiation, and how slowly evolving a new emotion is, for instance, before it reaches a definite form, but there is the great range of purely natural, spontaneous life, deriving its whole impetus from ancestral minds, where, as in hate and anger, it is impossible to study the slowly modifying forms precursory to the distinct mode. How can we find or produce in ourselves a state which is not yet hate, but merely hate in becoming, a half-differentiated, half-evolved hate? If we could put ourselves on the nisus side, and look up to hate as something to be reached, instead of something we may fall into, we might attain some idea of its process of formation. But since hate, anger, and so forth, invariably come upon us and overcome us, how can we appreciate their evolutionary stages? If we could trace these old intermediate disused forms which merely lead up to others, we should find them very strange, and should need an entirely new nomenclature for them. But to reach back and realize long outgrown and fossil psychoses, will, if ever possible, require more exertion and ability than even the intense struggle of the actual psychical advances which adds, by the efforts of exceptional individuals—“geniuses”—new modes of cognition and feeling to the mind of a race. To regress beyond a certain point is harder than to progress.

How then hate developed from non-hate, from anger, or from any other emotion, is obviously a very difficult problem. It would seem to us in our present stage of mentality that the first hate phenomenon was definitely and inexplicably such. We cannot perceive or conceive how the origin of hate is other than a sudden apparition of a new and elementary emotion in response to an extraordinary call upon some extraordinary organism in its life career. Yet we may easily believe that the direct occasion of its rise and progress was as complement to anger. Anger is certainly in general a very advantageous self-conservative factor, but by reason of its violence it requires a vast amount of vital energy to accomplish its end, and it thus also tends to disturb the cognitive power in its clear and cool actions. A burst of passion, though it may succeed in destroying the injurious, is both uneconomical and unintelligent. It is also a very transient phase. Anger will be defeated and supplanted in the evolution of life by some factor which has not these incidental disadvantages. Hate is such a superior psychosis, and is surer, steadier, and more economical than anger, and defeats it in the long run.

Hate then may be taken to exemplify the principle of antithetic evolution. We are careful not to raise the anger of some men and of some animals, and thus anger, or the capacity for anger, serves them as advantage and defence. We fear to make them mad. However, the antagonists of many individuals, knowing the weakening effect of such a strong emotion as anger, and knowing also how apt the angry one is to “lose his head,” purposely stimulate anger to their own advantage, and the disadvantage of the angered. Thus, cunning and wary animals, impelled by hate, often tease and torment their stronger and larger adversaries and competitors into a furious rage, which is so rash and unintelligent that they are completely at the mercy of the weaker. Where in such a way as this an advantageous variation is turned into disadvantageous by an opposing form, as anger by hate, we have what may be called an antithetic evolution. New psychic variations are then continually stimulated by the earlier, and it is only for a short time that any variation maintains itself as purely beneficial, but an answering one soon takes advantage of its weak points and turns it from self-conservative into self-destructive. Under the constant success of opposing factors, there is gradual loss of value and soon disuse, with the inception of some new form to combat more effectively the opponent. This opposing form meanwhile attains dominancy, culminates, and is gradually ousted by some variation which has been attained in order to meet the new weapons on the other side. Thus, in the battle of life, offence and defence, attack versus retreat and counter-attack, mutually stimulate to a series of new and higher antithetic psychic variations.

The so-called problem of evil is, then, tolerably easy to a thorough-going evolutionist. All developments, all perversions which are self-destructive rather than self-conservative to the individual, have received their original stimulus from other antagonistic individuals to whose interest it is to promote these evils to the utmost. What is an evil to me is first so much of a good to him whose interest lies in defeating and destroying me, and he will take advantage of all my weaknesses to his own profit. Competition and struggle involve the existence of evils to individuals who are conquered and maltreated in the battle of life. Disease and death itself is necessary to evolution on a finite sphere. As long as the good and desirable is limited as compared with the number of those who want, competition must exist, and this competition must be by both cultivating advantageous variations in ourselves, and also by cultivating the disadvantageous variations latent in our enemies. Thus, evil sown in others that our own good may be advanced is the general law of all life. To injure as much as possible all those who oppose, and to get as many as possible well affected towards us, and to be subservient to our ends, this is the meaning of psychical evolution in all its earlier, and most of its later, course. On any scheme of evolution by struggle, evil to particular individuals is a necessary fact. We throw, then, the problem back to how and why life arose and developed through this competition mode; and all science at present can say is that it is the “nature of things,” an expression which covers ignorance and is really metaphysical.

In all its later stages anger, and likewise hate as well, and all the allied emotions, attach only to what is distinctly known as animate. The futility and self-destructiveness of anger against the inanimate and insentient comes to be fully recognised. But early anger is quite undiscriminating. The hunter, who, pursued by an enraged bear, scatters his clothes and accoutrements behind him for the bear to tear in pieces, takes advantage of the unintelligent anger of the bear for his own ends. Since animals do not wear clothes they have no conception of what they are as independent insentient things distinct from the wearer. To the bear the weapons and clothes dropped by the hunter appear not as inanimate beings, but as living, vitally-connected parts of the creature pursued. The error arose, not from senselessness, but from lack of range of experience, and it is akin to the error of the ancient Mexicans who, having never seen a horse by itself, regarded a man on horseback as a single creature. A dog, the first time he sees his master unclothed, is greatly puzzled, and but slowly learns that clothes are something the master has and not what he is. When weapons, clothes, etc., are at length distinguished as property, there is yet a natural and right impulse to destroy them as injuring the owner; but the animal which stops to do this commits an error of judgment, as it is usually of more importance to despatch the hunter than to destroy his implements. It is the tendency of anger to destroy all which is in any wise connected with its object. This is true, not only of the animal world, but also of the lower human development. A savage in a fit of fury will slay, not only an offending fellow, but also his family and relations, and also destroy all his property. The uselessness, not to say the injustice, of such an indulgence of anger is only recognised at a comparatively late stage of evolution. Anger in its later form concerns itself only with purposive offence in its object, and vents itself solely on the individual offending. A clear distinction is drawn between animate and inanimate. Thus, my dog, playing with another, hurt itself by running into a tree, and gave an angry growl; but noticing the real nature of the paingiver as, not the other dog, but an inoffensive tree, his attitude immediately changed, and he seemed to take the injury as a matter of course. A puppy would in like case senselessly continue its demonstrations of anger to no good and perhaps to its own injury.

As to the function of anger and hate, this has already been intimated in the remarks we have just made on its origin and development. For function it is which gives rise to organ and activity; in some unknown, mysterious way the pressing life-struggle for useful mental activity determines ultimately its appearance. We know that extremely hard conditions, which would threaten the continued existence of animate life as a whole, or of any large subdivision, would give rise to new perceptions and emotions by which a saving remnant would escape; and on this principle we must expect the most signal psychic advance of the future at that seemingly remote period when mankind will be threatened with extinction by the slow refrigeration of the earth. A long-continued uniformity of easy conditions of life, as in the tropics, is distinctly unfavourable to psychic progress; but let a glacial period invade that zone, and the changed conditions would awaken such a struggle for existence in all organisms, man included, that new organic and mental types would be developed. The necessities of existence and the self-interest of the individual in an unceasingly sharp competition develop slowly in the few those mental modes which, from their functional importance, become the heritage of a race and genus; and these “sports” thereby secure to themselves a certain temporary dominancy. This is the history of life in general, and of man in particular. How demand determines supply, how necessity is the mother of invention, is obvious enough in man, who, clearly conceiving the function, sets about by his knowledge of means to accomplish the needed improvement; but in the lower life, which is incapable of such teleological foresight, we can only say that through pain of lack in the altered conditions of existence there is stimulated a blind, intense struggle, which, moving out in all lines, somewhere, at sometime, by mere chance hitting on the right variation, sticks to it and accomplishes its own salvation, and leaves descendants who tend in the same direction. New psychic qualities, as well as new physical organs, are in some way gradually determined through struggle which is practically blind. That mental variation, that bodily variation, which was incessantly demanded in the struggle of existence does somehow ultimately appear, is, indeed, a fact which, for the present at least, we can only state in this indefinite, unsatisfactory manner. Blind, pain-impelled will, fiercely striking out in every direction, does at length, achieve those new psychical and physical forms which are most needed by life. The chance serviceable variation is fixed and continued by reason of its serviceability; but when its utility wanes by reason of new life factors appearing or new conditions of existence, it is lost by disuse, or survives in rudimentary forms.

The function of hate is, like anger, to injure and eliminate the injurious; but what anger accomplishes by a sudden volcanic outburst, hate accomplishes in a slower, but surer and more subtle way. Hate is, as previously pointed out, a manifest improvement over anger as a method of offensive warfare. Other things being equal, the best hater is the most successful individual. Dr. Johnson had reason on his side when he said that he loved a good hater. A strong hater, who pertinaciously assails and injures his enemies, strengthens his own position and makes the largest place for himself in life. Hate, as a permanent, economically aggressive motion, marks certainly a great advance, and is of the highest import for life. If now hate has its own function as direct stimulus to offensive action toward those who will be injurious, toward those who are capable and likely to pain and harm us, how shall we explain the hate—and we might say anger as well—which arises at mere remembrance of injury, and which seems to have no immediate value for life?

In the first place we may well doubt whether any purely retrospective emotion exists, at least in early psychic life. The past, of course, has no value in and by itself; it is irretrievable, and emotional force spent upon it as such wasted—“no use crying for spilled milk.” It may well be that for simple psychisms the past never exists as such; at least, it is never a stopping point, but a mere datum for interpreting the inexperienceable. The sense of experience, especially in its temporal aspect, is very difficult of analysis; yet we may say with some confidence that at first it does not imply a sense of either the past or future as such. The mind is immediately impressed by the injuriousness of the injurious, which, though coming, of course, in terms of the experienced, is not relegated thereby to a past time, nor is it at all dwelt upon as such for emotion reaction. Primitive emotion is not backward looking; for this is in itself entirely futile, and primitive life depends for its existence and progress upon utility. The value of emotion is in stimulating preparedness for defence and offence. The representation of injury inflicted comes up to early mind as some injury being inflicted, or imminently so, or is applied at once in interpretation of the experienceable, with no thought or emotion for it as merely past fact. Advanced psychic life may stop at the first step, may indulge in retrospection for its own sake, and not for its immediate value in understanding the experienceable, but primitive emotion is ever an alertness and anticipatory readiness.

If, now, we turn to some classification of the anger group in itself and in its general relation to emotion, we obtain something like the following:—

Emotion.		Reaction to injurious.		Regressive—fear.
				Aggressive—anger.
		Reaction to beneficial.		Receptive.
				Appropriative.
Anger		Simple anger or wrath.
		Intensive—Rage or fury.
		Incipient—Displeasure.
		Mild—Irritation.
		Response to purposive injury—Hate.
		Altruistic—Indignation.
		Sentiment—Indignation and Hate.
		Retrospective—Resentment.
		Revenge.
		Sub-hate—Detestation.
		Despite.
		Scorn.

But few remarks need to be added to elucidate the outline. Exasperation is plainly a late form of anger. It belongs to the period when anger has been subjected to will restraint, and when something passes all bounds of forbearance—is “perfectly maddening”—we are exasperated. Anger of a high and peculiar intensity produced by special and repeated provocation is known as exasperation. For intensive hate there seems no special word, at least, in English, though we denote it by adjective as bitter, malignant, virulent. Detest sometimes means strong hatred. Malice is not an emotion; it is a state of mind which is implied in hate, namely, deliberate intent to injure. We do not say we feel malicious; but if we hate, we are malicious. Malice is merely an objective term for a will element in hate, and denotes character of act.

The sight of injury done to others produces indignation. When law or principle injured and violated excites indignation or hate, we have that feeling for the abstract—rarely pure—which is termed sentiment. He who is indignant at injustice and he who hates sin have risen to the highest evolution of the anger group. For an account of resentment and revenge see chapter on Retrospective Emotion. In the earlier stages both anger and hate are rather undiscriminating as to rank or status of opposing object, but in later evolution there must be a sense of equality. When we consider the offending ones as entirely below us, as unworthy of our anger or hate, we detest or despise. Our relations with them may compel us to notice them and to have some feeling toward them, but we would not lower ourselves to fight them. To detest is to feel a strong revulsion, but it also in measure has a direct objective movement. Still, although detestation, despising, scorn, contempt, are by no means so actively aggressive as the other members of the group, they have evidently a direct affiliation with hate and anger. In all these there is direct repulse of all relation with what is below us, a position holding off and looking down upon the offending object as too small and mean for us to seriously oppose.

We cannot at present elaborate more fully an analysis, a genetic investigation, nor a classification, of what must appear to every attentive student of mind as a most important and extraordinary group of psychic phenomena. In all the lower psychic life with every perception comes an emotion reaction, very generally either of a fear or anger character. Everything perceived has a definite life meaning, nothing is indifferent, and, in fact, primitive perception cannot exist except as prompting and being prompted by emotion or feeling. For the low psychism there is no such vast collection of practically indifferent objects, a world of things, as maintains a constant and large place in advanced psychism. Lower mental life is piecemeal, inconsequent and broken, and wholly directed by feeling phases. Every object has its place only in relation to self-interest, as favouring or injuring. This is impressed upon those who have made any study of lower human types, and of wild animals, where your very presence, no matter how accidental and really meaningless, is construed as suggesting detriment, and suspicion is aroused, a preparatory stage to some fear or anger exhibition, one of those being often nascent, though sometimes not very active owing to the lack of full certainty as to your injuriousness. For the savage, who is incapable of disinterestedness, and wholly given up to self-seeking, the missionary and scientist must have some hidden personal motive, some intent to take advantage of them, and profit by them. From the first they are regarded with fear, anger, or hate. The strange and peculiar is hated merely for being unlike the self, and all non-conformity means personal slight and insult. With primitive psychism all objects are coloured by a strong emotion light, and this remains a tendency till the latest stages of evolution.

Anger and hate have by no means spent their force, even for human evolution in some of its more advanced forms. We all recognise the necessity of “spirit” to success. The one who is incapable of anger and of venting it powerfully is a weakling, and will be trodden under foot in the battle of life. The high sense of personal honour and advantage, which will brook no insult with impunity, or allow no injury to go unpunished and unresented, is still the sine qua non of worldly success. Show anger, hate, and defiance to all those who invade your rights; stand up and fight the battle of life against every oncomer, and secure and hold the position against all competitors. In the natural course of events—the struggle for self-conservation and self-aggrandizement—the meek do not inherit the earth, but rather those who are irascibly aggressive.

The most notable revolution in human history against the general course of evolution which we have been considering has come from Christianity. The world says, “If any one smite you on the cheek, hit him between the eyes”; the Nazarene says, “Offer him the other cheek also”; the world says, “If any one takes away your cloak, fall upon him and despoil him of his all”; the Nazarene says, “Give him your coat also”; the world says, “Hate your enemies”; the Nazarene says, “Love your enemies, bless them which curse you, and do good to them that despitefully use you.” The law of natural evolution by fear, anger, hate, strife, is replaced by a new law of a spiritual evolution through forbearance, humility, love, loyalty to truth, to beauty, to goodness, and to holiness in a kingdom not of this “world.” Life consists, not in making friends and fighting enemies, but in a fight with one’s self to realize unselfish ideals, to exemplify the highest principles and laws, and to achieve the largest and best work, without regard to self-conservation or self-aggrandizement. In this radically new evolution the mind is for itself, and is not, as in the lower evolution, merely a utilitarian factor, subservient to the general demands of life. Life, on the contrary, here becomes subservient to the development of mentality purely for its own sake. Thus pure science, art for art’s sake, an independent morality and religion, become possible. The greatest minds of the race are those who have lived most completely this highest life; but this new form scarcely touches the great bulk of humanity, and is very partially developed even in the so-called highest classes.

But it is not our present purpose to survey the higher evolution, or to point out its rationale. For the lower evolution, however, it is tolerably evident that fear, anger and hate, give the dominant tone to psychic life. These strong, direct emotions act as fundamental life factors; without them the individual would be quickly overwhelmed in the struggle for existence. The conditions of early life absolutely require these simple, naïve emotions to stimulate advantageous reactions. Emotional indifferentism is possible only as an artificial and by-product, a sort of disease or abnormal symptom even in the very latest phases of human evolution. The comparative psychology of the future will show more and more clearly and fully the nature and function of both the fear and anger groups as factors in biologic evolution.

CHAPTER XI
SURPRISE AND DISAPPOINTMENT, EMOTION OF
NOVELTY

To anticipate what is to occur is plainly one of the most useful achievements of mind, for all providence implies apprehension and emotion therewith. But to look before and after is certainly not the prerogative of man alone, but anticipatory power is found throughout the realm of mind, and constitutes the larger portion of all cognition. To know a thing means, in general, to appreciate its potentiality; and all science is really prescience. Knowledge is not the immediate sensation, but the meaning of it for life; it is the ideal translation from one sense to another in feeling tendency. Thus, to scent is by itself a useless acquirement, but the connecting it with desired food is of the utmost service. The psychism gradually attains the power to interpret by various media the nature, that is, the experienceability, of the environment.

To foresee is then one of the commonest events in mind, and according to the painfulness or pleasurability foreseen is felt anger or fear, hope or desire, or allied emotions. But the foreseen does not always come to pass, and hence there results a new order of intellectual and emotional reaction. That what we had in mind would happen comes not, or is other than foreseen; this has a disturbing effect on cognition and emotion. Prescience defeated becomes not merely nescience, but there is the positive definite shock of surprise, and the emotion of disappointment or some correlated form. Surprise as the sense of contrast of real and ideal, involving personal sense of limitation and error, is, as we have noted (pp. 50 ff.), a painful experience. But where there is no preconceived notion, no expectation, there is no surprise, as Lumholtz remarks of the Australian savages, that they are not surprised at the railway and other wonders of civilization; they do not know enough to be surprised. The full apprehension and understanding of the gap between ideal and real is but very slowly attained. At first the thwarting is naturally and easily attributed to an enemy, and there is anger and pertinacious violence, but ultimately, by sad and repeated experience, mind is led to notice its own insufficiency, to feel that the conflict between the actual and the expected is due to subjective error rather than objective interference. Genuine surprise, as distinct from mere nervous shock, is then, I think, a later phenomenon than is generally supposed. What is often taken for surprise with animals and children is really eager attention. Again, certain modes of fright are often taken for surprise. But experience must have made a considerable advance in apprehension of experienceability before a real surprise can be manifested, which is always the correlative of a sudden contrariness of experience to what was preconceived. Surprise involves a certain measure of a theory of experience; in short, a more or less definite body of knowledge. One who has framed no ideas of what experience should be can never be really surprised at whatever may happen. However, to be able to feel surprise is obviously very advantageous, to have a painful and sharp sense of the incongruity of real and ideal often conducts to that investigation which results in being prepared against being surprised in the same way again. The imperfectness of adaptation is thus consciously and intelligently remedied. The man of large resources, cautious nature, and keen insight and foresight, is little liable to be surprised, for in all circumstances he accurately forecasts a very wide range of possibilities.

When the good expected comes in less measure than was foreseen, or not at all, or some real evil instead, there is not merely surprise, but disappointment as well. When what is confidently expected does not happen, the emotional reaction is surprise; when what is eagerly hoped for does not occur, disappointment is the result. I am disappointed in not receiving a certain remittance I had hoped for. Here the ought to be, the expected, is ranged over against the actual not, as in surprise, as a sudden and painful change in cognition, but solely for the personal advantage missed. Disappointment is bound up with the sense of personal loss and detriment from the happening contrary to expectation. Feeling of disappointment is thus emotional reaction from cognizance of evil result where good is looked for. The more it was hoped for, the more bitter the disappointment. This disappointment has its function as an emphatic protest against impracticality; the lessons of experience are thus brought home and made memorable. Disappointment turns life from false dreams to stern realities; it prompts to an investigation of causes, and rouses cognition to a full understanding of the situation. Hope thereby becomes more and more rational and realizable.

In all disappointment we note that the feeling is not about the past as such, but is with reference to the immediately actual in its unexpected bearing on life. Thus it is not strictly retrospective emotion. Though often initial to regret and grief, it should not be confounded with these.

A curiously illogical remark, and one not uncommonly heard, is, “I hope you will succeed, but do not be disappointed if you don’t.” This is really a psychological Hibernicism. Hope is the foundation of disappointment, and one cannot say, “hope, but do not be disappointed,” in the same breath with definite meaning. We cannot escape the painful implications of unfulfilled desire: we cannot both have our cake and eat it too. Some measure of expectation of success is implied in all futuritive effort, hence a like measure of disappointment. The real sense of any such admonition can only be for moderating desire, and so tempering possible reaction. The expression in question amounts to little else than a phrase of well-wishing, but with little confidence in the actual result.

From the feeling of surprise and its congener, disappointment, it is natural to turn to the feeling for novelty. Surprise and novelty both relate, but in different ways, to the character of the experience in relation to other experiences. The strangeness, however, in what is surprising, and which makes it surprising, is not intrinsic, but wholly relative to a preconception. Thunder is familiar to me, but it may surprise me if it occur in January, and also totally out of my preconceived order; but a friend who has neither heard, nor heard of, thunder, will not be surprised by the sound in January, though he may be startled, and may feel the novelty of the phenomenon. The novel, purely as such, cannot surprise, for there is no field for the expectation which is the foundation of surprise. The surprising is always contrary to expectation, but the novel is simply unexpected, not in the range of thought and conception in any manner. A novel experience is one which has previously been unexperienced, and the feeling of novelty is the feeling of it as such, while a surprising experience goes quite against all we look for, and is often familiar and common enough, though sometimes it is novel, as when the absolutely new experience and not some familiar experience comes in place of the expected experience. If the man to whom thunder is novel is awaiting merely the pattering of rain, the crash of thunder will excite both feelings of surprise and novelty. In this case he is surprised before he feels the novelty of the surprising event.

A feeling for the novelty of an experience implies sense of experience and experienceable, and is thus debarred from primitive consciousness, which is merely a series of disconnected flashes, occurring a few times at the critical moments in an organism’s life. It is probable that in the origin of mind the first consciousness was the last, an entirely unique and isolated phenomenon in the animal’s life, hence supremely novel. However, at first, and undoubtedly also in later mind, consciousness but slowly rises to the sense of novelty of consciousness as such. After a long period of unconsciousness from any cause we do not appreciate returning consciousness as per se a comparatively novel phenomenon. In early mind every experience is practically a new experience, and so novel, but as there is no cognizance of experience in any light, and least of all in this light which is rather remote from immediate practicality, the feeling for novelty does not occur. Sense of novelty implies a comparison of experience purely for its own sake, certainly a very late acquirement. Thus in primitive mind, though all experiences are uniformly fresh, yet they are not appreciated as such. The feeling for novelty must always rest upon a considerable body of experience unified by ego-sense and apprehended as such, that is, consciousness of novelty implies both consciousness of consciousness and self-consciousness. The consciousness of novelty is thus far from being equivalent to novel consciousness. Whenever, even in advanced mind, a novel consciousness occurs, we should be over hasty if we at once concluded that feeling of novelty was also experienced.

The first step in life is to get an experience, to struggle into a consciousness which may be immediately valuable, and which is at once emotional and motor in its action; the second step is to compare and identify the experience gained so as to ascertain its meaning for life with greater certainty. Recognition thus comes early into play, but while the sphere of the sense of the novel lies in that of the unrecognised, it does not in any wise occupy the whole, for much that is unrecognised still is far from conveying feeling of novelty, because this feeling is, as we have said, far from being experienced on every presentation of the novel. The novel is equivalent rather to the unrecognisable. A dog may lose in a few months the power of recognising its master, yet the master after such a lapse of time cannot be said to awaken sense of novel. Though not recognised for master he is recognised as one of many familiar objects, he is known to be a man, and that is as far as the identification goes. The experience then is in reality not a fresh one. Here is a new man but there is nothing novel in the experience, much less is there a feeling of novelty. I doubt much if a dog or any lower animal notices and appreciates pleasurably or painfully the novel as such. The unrecognisable and unclassifiable presented to them may agitate them in various ways, as contrast a horse and a courageous dog on first seeing a locomotive, but there is no evidence of real feeling of the novelty of the experience as such. The enjoyment of the novel for its own sake is probably wholly confined to late human psychism.

It must, indeed, be granted that change from monotonous or confining circumstances is appreciated and appreciated pleasurably by lower animals, though they may not know enough to seek change for its own sake. Animals certainly suffer from ennui, and enjoy variety within certain limits, but change is not newness, and absolute change or novelty in strict sense hardly appeals to them, that is, they do not appreciate the novelty of a situation. The really novel disturbs them, they do not desire it nor are pleased with it. It is only in fact in the higher ranges of human mind that experience of any kind, novel or various, comes to be sought for its own sake. To say, “this is a novel sensation,” or “how novel and delightful,” and all similar expressions, denotes a frame of mind which is artificial, that is, lies away from and beyond the common course of psychism under natural selection. The changefulness of experience and the novelty of an experience are in reality two distinct elements. One who has been ill in bed for weeks enjoys the change in sitting up in his arm chair, but there is no real novelty or sense of novelty. Everything, we say, is novel and interesting to the child, tiresome and a bore to the blasé man of the world. The world is, in truth, fresh and new to the child, but the sense of the novel per se is very slowly developed, and the rarer the novel becomes, the more keen our appreciation of it. Where all is novel, there can be no sense of novelty, for this is purely a contrast type of psychosis. The zest and eagerness of the child proceeds from radically other sentiments than the feeling for novelty; it is absorbed in things for themselves and what they directly give, and does not stop to reflect and feel about the relations of experiences, and so feel the novel as such. Further we note that pleasing novelties are far from being equally pleasing as such. It may be as novel to carry a potato in my pocket as a double eagle, but not equally pleasing. The real value of novelty for emotion must always be carefully determined by subtracting accessory feelings.

With regard to the relation of novelty to pleasure and pain, the novel and the sense of the novel is always in its inception under evolution by natural selection unpleasant and painful. A novel experience is one which can only originate in painful struggle, and the new is always per se distasteful to early mind, which is ever conservative in its instincts and tendencies. A perfect life, biologically speaking, is one which is perfectly adapted to its environment, and so goes through its evolution with mechanically exact adjustment to circumstances; and the novel would break in upon the unconscious rhythm which is here perfected. Habituation becomes so iron fast that the novel, even when distinctly pleasurable in itself, is resented, much less is the novel sought for its own sake. However, so far as a novel experience may come rather by way of regressiveness than progressiveness, it may delight us by its novelty whenever the mind becomes capable of appreciating novelty. Thus purely hereditary tendencies, which we do not accomplish but which are accomplished in us during youth, as, for instance, the sexual evolution, may charm, not only in themselves, but for their novelty as well. But this experience which is not merely novel to the individual as springing up spontaneously by impetus from the past, but which is novel for the race, and requires effort to assimilate, and so is in the distinct line of higher evolution, as, the achieving a high spiritual sentimentality in love; this, the real novel, is inevitably and naturally painful. The first time the emotion of humility—a comparatively recent evolution—was experienced by a human being was a truly novel experience, though it is quite uncertain whether there was with it either sense or sentiment of novelty.

If the novel and the novel experience—and these terms are practically identical—are essentially painful, whence and how arises the peculiar pleasure which we undeniably may experience in connection with the novel appreciated as such? Must all such pleasure be placed to the account of regressiveness? But pleasure of this kind is intrinsic in the act itself and not for its novelty per se. There is a wide variety of experience intrinsically either pleasurable or painful, which may be pleasurable to us solely by reason of its novelty. I may enjoy the novel experience of tasting a pomegranate, be the actual experience agreeable or disagreeable, merely enjoying the novelty as such. What is this novelty, why is it noticed, and why does it give occasion to pleasure or pain in emotional form?

As we have already pointed out, the sense of the novel and emotion about it cannot be said to arise with novel experiences in general. The novel in the objective sense is the first occurrence of any given definite kind of psychosis, as humility or pity, in the history of mind, and this novelty is probably not at first appreciated.

Bain says that novelty is not an emotion, but “merely expresses the superior force of all stimulants on being first applied.” But from the point of view of psychic history the initial force of stimulants is always very inferior and slight. For example, to taste and to qualitatively distinguish tastes is an extremely slow growth in the race, and by no means suddenly completed even in the offspring of the most advanced individuals. Place a drop of wormwood extract on an infant’s tongue and it may have a novel sensation and a disagreeable one, as evidenced by the reaction, yet the real force of the sensation is certainly quite inferior to that of a ten year old child in the given case. The absolutely new impression is always slight, for mind is, in the natural course of evolution, always slow at fully experiencing things, it is by effort and by effort alone that it attains the several orders of sensation and perception, and it is only by effort that they are realized with greater and greater force and clearness. By the very nature of psychic evolution as a progressive process toward helping adjustability the novel exercises at the first but a slight reaction. However, in the exigencies of existence the most wide awake, those most susceptible to perceiving novelties and new circumstances and to being suitably affected by them, have the advantage. Hence the apprehension, interpretation, and application, of novelties is the path of progress which finally culminates in the achievements of human invention. An openness to the novel is thus of prime importance in a practical way, though this is quite distinct from the pleasing sense of novelty. However, the novel is not primarily attractive and interesting in and for itself, but this must be accounted a late evolution in an artificial period. The novel is at the first anything but charming. The absolutely novel is never pleasant for its own sake.

It is only in a relative way that the objectively novel pleases, that is, in the way of variety and change. Where overflowing mental energy by reason of habituation finds no full and easy diverse activity the mind is hampered and constrained. Thus youth in particular finds delight and relief in new sights and sounds, in fresh experiences of all kinds. Quickly wearied and exhausted in one channel and yet full of active power, the mind springs rapidly from object to object along those lines which ancestral experience has rendered the lines of least resistance, thus especially in the plays and sports of childhood.

While the novel in this way as change pleases, yet there is no pleasing sense of novelty. Sensations, sights, sounds, tastes, etc., please by their novelty, there is a pleasure in the sensations not merely intrinsic but relative to previous experiences, but the mind is not yet capable of the emotion of novelty which belongs to reflective consciousness. The child may be pleased by the novel, but is not consciously charmed by the novelty. The sense of experience as novel, and as such pleasing, belongs to a higher grade of consciousness than the naïve direct consciousness of the child. Novelty consciously known, appreciated, and sought for its own sake is a decidedly late evolution. There is an emotion and emotion of pleasure which we may feel in view of the novel per se. Not merely the new object becomes the stimulant of a new and refreshing experience, but this experience being known as novel by the reflecting consciousness, and contrasted with other experiences, there comes therewith a peculiar ripple of pleasurable emotion, the emotion of the novel. The first emotion of novelty is itself thereby a novel consciousness which might be, to a very reflective self-conscious mind, an object for another emotion of novelty. In touching upon the emotion of novelty we have thus risen beyond the common course of natural selection, to the point where experience values itself for its own sake.

In contrast to the emotion of novelty is the emotion of familiarity. This might be discussed in a strictly parallel way to our discussion of the emotion of novelty. It is founded upon likeness, being the sentiment of likeness. An absolute novelty, the perfectly new, is of course imperceptible as such, and by the law of continuity cannot occur in nature. Some correlation with past experience is required to make the thing cognizable at all, as is also some measure of unlikeness to make it distinguishable and so familiar. The emotion of familiarity is much neglected by psychologists, yet it forms a more important and a larger element in the pleasures of advanced mind than the emotion of novelty. Many of the delights of home and domestic life are tinged by it. The pleasing sense of familiarity is, of course, most felt in contrast after some long experience of novelties, as when the traveller returns home from a prolonged journey. Delight in the familiar for its own sake often largely prompts to the revisiting old scenes and renewing old habits. The emotions of novelty and familiarity have a constant contrasting play in many men. The familiar which is painful in itself may yet, like the novel painful in itself, be pleasurable. We often welcome the familiar and novel purely for their own sake whatever be their actual hedonalgic[C] content.

[Footnote C: This adjective, which I used before seeing Mr. Marshall’s “algedonic,” more exactly expresses pleasure—pain quality.]

Noticed familiarity like novelty may be painful. The disgusting emotion by which we may meet the unwelcome novelty, has its correlate in the wearing sense of monotony from the regular return of the familiar even though it be intrinsically pleasurable.